If the system determines that the user pronounced the keyword that wakes the system up (in this case “Alexa”), the X-CUBE-VS4A libraries and tools send the clean audio buffer to the AVS cloud and receive a response from Amazon. This is also known as the audio front-end. Very simply, the Discovery kit captures the surrounding audio using one of its omnidirectional MEMS microphones and pre-processes the signal using algorithms from Sensory to enable speech recognition and keyword spotting. Finally, it also has the audio front-end necessary to use a simple demo application. It’s also possible to connect it to the Internet through a Wi-Fi daughter board or its Ethernet port. The board uses a STM32F769NIH6 MCU with 512 KB of RAM and 2 MB of Flash. To ensure engineers can quickly experiment with some of the features of X-CUBE-VS4A, we’ve included application examples for our STM32F769 Discovery Kit. From STM32F7 to AVS and Back The STM32F769 Discovery Kit Before a company can sell a product that connects to AVS, Amazon certifies that the system respects specific latency and protocols, among other things, and X-CUBE-VS4A helps meet those requirements.
#Alexa handshaker 4 software#
Furthermore, unlike competing solutions for popular operating systems, our software pack will help teams get the right AVS certifications faster. However, X-CUBE-VS4A provides all the libraries, drivers, and routine developers will need for our component. Very often, teams gravitate toward traditional Linux systems because they already possess significant tools such as a TCP/IP stack that significantly simplify development, whereas choosing an MCU can sometimes mean starting from scratch. X-CUBE-VS4A is also a testament to the ST ecosystem.
However, over time, we can expect Amazon to further optimize its solution, and X-CUBE-VS4A still represents a massive achievement as it’s the first time it can efficiently run on an MCU. Currently, only STM32F7 and STM32H7 components are compatible with the software pack, because AVS’s current implementation requires a fair amount of memory and computational throughput. For instance, the libraries in X-CUBE-VS4A use our crypto-cores to accelerate cryptographic operations, thus saving energy and increasing performance. Indeed, the most prominent feat of X-CUBE-VS4A is that it ported to STM32 MCUs the necessary protocols responsible for connecting a device to the AVS cloud and that it optimized certain aspects for the hardware units of our microcontrollers. Alexa Voice Service: From MCU to Cloud Using the STM32Cube environment to implement AVS. Thanks to X-CUBE-VS4A, it’s going to be a lot easier to bring AVS to small devices because using a power-hungry application processor is no longer necessary. Whether it is to control home appliances, check weather forecasts, or get the answer to a burning question at three in the morning by just using voice commands instead of turning on a phone, AVS offers a rich experience that sets the benchmark for the rest of the industry. Thanks to Amazon’s SDK (Software Development Kit), engineers can take advantage of Amazon’s APIs to bring voice control to their device and benefit from a lot of the same infrastructure that makes Amazon Echo speakers unique. ST continues to partner with Amazon in more ways than one (see our STM32 products in its different stores), and the focus on Alexa Voice Service brings out a new aspect of our collaboration.
#Alexa handshaker 4 portable#
X-CUBE-VS4A is thus a significant breakthrough because it brings AVS to more portable applications to open designers to a whole new type of smart devices. This design homogeneity often stems from the use of a beefy application processor that connects to cloud services and processes information, but limits what engineers can actually create. They adopt a cylindrical shape, they are tethered to a wall socket and can get so hot that they can possibly scar certain wood surfaces. Today, we associate voice services from Amazon, Apple, or Google with smart speakers and if these devices are new and successful, they often look similar. X-CUBE-VS4A is the first software package to bring Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to our microcontrollers (MCU).
#Alexa handshaker 4 license#
The reference design also comes with an evaluation license for the Alexa wake word detection technology. Additionally, the firmware will help developers with signal processing, such as noise reduction measures, echo cancellation, and beam-forming algorithms. It’s also the first single-chip design in the industry.
The new solution provides a hardware implementation that solves many technical challenges, like the close placement of microphones in tight spaces. We just launched a qualified Alexa Voice Service for AWS IoT reference design, which replaces X-CUBE-VS4A.
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