Sensory Unveils Cross-Platform Wake Word AI That Supports Multiple Voice Assistants While Maintaining Ideal Performance

Sensory Updates TrulyHandsfree with Capabilities That Align With the Voice Interoperability Initiative Led by Amazon

Sensory, a leader in embedded voice, vision and biometrics AI announces new capabilities for TrulyHandsfree™, the company’s widely-deployed wake word engine, that enables support for multiple wake words from any combination of leading brands, custom branded wake words, small vocabulary command sets or even user defined wake words where the end user can create their own phrase. This technology supports Amazon and the numerous supporters of the Voice Interoperability Initiative (VII) announced in September and allows brands to get a jumpstart on the development of products that feature multiple simultaneous voice services. “Multiple simultaneous wake words provide the best option for customers,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in Amazon’s VII press release.

“We are lucky to have worked closely with most of the leaders in voice services to help create products with their wake words embedded. Because of this, we already have all of the data in place to combine multiple models,” said Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory. “However, everyone in the industry has found that combining two or more wake word models into a product poses a significant challenge in maintaining optimal performance. The new capabilities we added to TrulyHandsfree overcomes some of the accuracy challenges without significantly boosting MIPS and memory requirements.”

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Sensory has already collected the data and built deep learned models for “Hey Cortana”, “Alexa”, “OK Google”, “Hey Siri”, “Hi Bixby”, “Xiao-du Xiao-du” and over 2 dozen other assistants. These wake words have been approved for market and are already shipping in real products with proven performance and reliability in ultra-low power applications like wearables and mobile phones, to high-performance applications like vehicles, smart speakers and home appliances.

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TrulyHandsfree employs a new technique to enable multiple wake words without linearly increasing the error rates, which has been the main challenge associated with running multiple wake words on one device. With traditional approaches, adding a new wake word meant the sum of the error rates of each individual wake word, but with TrulyHandsfree the accuracy doesn’t degrade as fast, offering support for more wake words with less false accepts and false rejects. “Also, on our roadmap for a 2020 release is multi-wake word adaptation that will allow devices to know who is talking to them and to adapt the voice model to better work with each individual user,” Mozer added.

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