AI voice recognition technology in your ‘Home Smart Home’
Voice recognition technology dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, when it was first used in telephone systems, and has developed rapidly in the 21st century. In 2001, the introduction of Siri by Apple popularized the technology. Nowadays, voice recognition offers response speeds in the millisecond range and a high degree of accuracy.
A voiceprint, used for voice recognition, refers to the audio data that represents the voice characteristics of a speaker, as well as the speech model built with this data. Similar to fingerprints, almost every voiceprint is unique. However, unlike speech recognition, which focuses on understanding the content of a speech, voice recognition focuses on the identity of the speaker. Hence it is also known as speaker recognition.
The rise of voice recognition technology is now impacting the field of smart homes in exciting ways.
Voice Recognition: A New Key to Unlock Smart Home Personalization
Here are some of the advances enabled by voice recognition in smart homes.
Personalized services: Every person has a unique voiceprint. Smart home devices can therefore accurately identify the user through voice recognition and provide personalized services.
Improved security: Voice recognition technology can be used as a powerful method of identity authentication to effectively prevent unauthorized access. For example, you can set up a voice lock that can only be unlocked by people who pass a voiceprint verification.
Enhanced interactions: Voice recognition technology enables more natural and convenient human-machine interactions. You can now eliminate all the complicated steps previously required to operate various devices, and control them simply with your voice.
Voice recognition technology works with all kinds of smart home appliances, including smart speakers, smart refrigerators, smart washing machines, lights, and air conditioners, providing personalized settings and operation.
While the thought of commanding your entire house with a single sentence is attractive to say the least, it is not easy to apply this technology to actual products and bring them to market.
Voice Recognition in Your Home: All the Hidden Barriers
As a biometric technology, voice recognition offers countless possibilities for use at home. Yet, there are still some unsolved challenges blocking commercialization on a large scale.
Noise interference: Background noises in the home, such as the sounds of TV, music and pets, interfere with the accuracy of voice recognition. Therefore advanced noise suppression technologies and noise filtering algorithms are required.
Changes in voiceprint characteristics: Factors such as age and health may cause changes in a person’s vocal cords, altering the characteristics of their voiceprint. Furthermore, a person’s vocal characteristics can be influenced by emotions, leading to recognition errors. For all of these reasons, voice recognition algorithms need to be constantly improved.
Disguise attacks: An attacker can bypass a voice recognition system by recording and imitating a target person’s voice. The development and updating of generative artificial intelligence enable increasingly successful attempts to emulate a person’s speech, thus posing a threat to systems that work with voice recognition. Algorithms and systems to combat attacks and counterfeiting have therefore become the focus of the industry in recent years.
Device compatibility: Different home devices may have different voice recognition standards and technologies, thus presenting the challenge of achieving cross-device compatibility and consistency for a seamless system experience.
Avnet has been closely involved with IoT technology and its application in smart homes for many years, and has a deep knowledge of related standards and certifications. Its team of experts are able to provide customers with one-stop solutions covering multiple mainstream standards, such as EnOcean, KNX®, Thread, LonWorks, and BACnet, as well as wireless communication technologies like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. They are able to tailor standardized solutions to ensure that products meet the requirements of the global market and reach the market in the shortest possible time.
Privacy protection: Voice recognition involves the collection of personal biometric data, making the protection of user privacy and data security important issues. Effective encryption and security measures must be taken to prevent data breach or misuse.
Avnet’s team of experts are able to ensure the secure and reliable transmission of data by explaining encryption options in detail, including the differences between public and private keys and their application scenarios. Whether products utilize a wired or wireless connection, they can provide the optimal solution.
Long product development cycle: The development of smart home products involves multiple steps, from hardware design and software development to system integration. In addition, each step often requires a vast amount of time and resources to complete.
With a wide range of product lines, development tools, and professional technical support, Avnet can efficiently build prototype systems for its customers, thus shortening their product development cycles. Many customers have effectively halved their product development cycle by utilizing Avnet’s expertise and global resources.
Furthermore, Avnet can offer its customers all the technological options required to build an application. For example, circuit boards can be designed with various components such as processors, simulators, and connectors. If modules with embedded systems are preferred, it offers circuit boards, wireless modules, and add-on modules in a variety of external specifications and performance options. Or, if a customer needs to focus on intellectual property (IP) development and requires hardware to run their code, Avnet is able to offer various servers and integrated systems to meet their needs.
As voice recognition and other innovative smart home technologies gain traction, Avnet will continue to provide its customers with all-round support, helping them overcome challenges and shorten the time to market for exciting new products.
With technologies like AI voice recognition and solution providers like Avnet, the modern home will soon become ‘home smart home’ – and all the sweeter for it.
