Intel and Amazon partner on voice recognition tech
The Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit is now up for pre-order.
Intel and Amazon are partnering to combine the former's silicon and smarts with the latter's Alexa voice platform. The chipmaker has introduced the Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit to provide a "complete audio front-end solution for far-field voice control," according to a press release. The idea is that Intel has done the hard work of designing the mic arrays and voice systems and that all developers will need to do is write applications for them. It offers algorithms for echo cancellation and beam forming, wake words, an 8-mic array and the company's dual digital signal processor.
The development kit is up for pre-order starting today for $399. And while that might be a little too expensive for a hobbyist developer (a Raspberry Pi costs $25), it isn't exorbitantly priced like some game console development kits. If you wait until after the pre-order window, the cost jumps by $100.
Of course, if you don't want to get your hands dirty with hardware -- or spend any money -- you can always make skills for Alexa for free with Amazon's developer portal. That's helped Amazon's voice platform grow by leaps and bounds, so it'll be interesting to see what effect Intel's new kit will have.
