Knowles Releases New Broad Market Development Kit to Speed up Voice Integration for Bluetooth Devices

Knowles Corporation (NYSE: KN), a market leader and global provider of advanced micro-acoustic microphones and speakers, audio processing, and precision device solutions, today announced the AISonic Bluetooth Standard Solution, a new, complete development solution that enables fast and easy voice integration to Bluetooth devices. The development kit enables OEM and ODMs to build voice-activated calling, control, and far-field speech recognition capabilities into Bluetooth devices, including smart speakers, smart home locks, connected light switches, wearables, in-vehicle voice assistants, and more.

AISonic Bluetooth Standard Solution is one development package available under Knowles’ new line of reference solutions for voice activation, control, and contextual audio processing for TVs, portable speakers, soundbars, whitegoods, and a wide range of IoT electronics, known as Knowles Industry Standard Solutions. The kit is built upon Knowles industry-leading AISonic Audio Edge Processor IA8201, which achieves high performance along with the industry’s lowest power consumption to enable wake-on-voice functionality in small, battery-operated devices.

“The demand for voice control in all aspects of our lives is growing – smart home device control, such as turning on and off lights or asking our virtual assistant for directions in our car, is becoming commonplace. But the market is fragmented, and with more connected devices coming to market it has become increasingly difficult to quickly integrate voice capabilities that work seamlessly,” said Vikram Shrivastava, senior director, IoT Marketing at Knowles. “Device manufacturers need high-quality, broad market development solutions to bring these capabilities to market quickly and scale to keep up with the fast-evolving way that we are living, working, and communicating. We’ve leveraged Knowles’ audio and voice integration expertise to create a powerful suite of standard solutions for different applications to make it easier for manufacturers to quickly and efficiently add speech recognition and voice capabilities to devices and get to market in a fraction of the time.”

The AISonic Bluetooth Standard Solution Package balances scalability and flexibility to bring ease of integration across a myriad of embedded platforms. The kit features an IA8201 reference board accompanied with an API supporting integration with Bluetooth chipsets having an embedded MCU running an RTOS, and system firmware release configured to support sensors and pre-integrated microphones from Knowles to enable the highest quality audio capture. The solution has helped Knowles partners to scale further in developing AWS-AVS, Alexa Auto and AVS-AMA solutions on several Bluetooth and embedded MCU platforms.