Technology
Our technology adds the voice element to graphical user interfaces, enabling control by touch, sight, and also voice – providing a “Voice-enabled User Interface (VUI)” that is needed with today’s increasingly complex devices. Voice is a natural way to communicate, and Avoca technology makes it a natural way to control electronic products, and select the content you want. This technology is part of a emerging new technology product category called Voice Control and Search Technology (VCST).
The addition of “voice-enabling” helps the user navigate around tiny buttons and screens. But voice application requires a powerful hardware platform and a careful matching of the hardware, software and application-specific content management. Embedded applications compound the challenge – a self-contained voice-enabling solution is needed, yet implementation is constrained by space and available power. Avoca designs custom or standard product solutions to meet these challenges.
We focus on embedded technology, using speech recognition domain expertise, embedded software and hardware design skills, and project management to provide our customers with a fast way to get a complex job done, and make it look easy.
A speaker-independent voice control platform, with an easy to use API for product designers, is the foundation of our offerings. In addition, we provide a way for devices to dialog with users, using text-to-speech (TTS) technology, enabling many new hands-free, eyes-free applications. User control scenarios can be based on a fixed command format, or natural language understanding (NLU), which gives much more flexibility to the user as he or she speaks to a product.
For content management, we can enhance content databases substantially, by adding phonetic information, including conversion of text descriptions or item names to a SAMPA-compliant phonetic format. SAMPA is a global standard for phonetic representations of how words sound when spoken (Speech Assessment Method Phonetic Alphabet).
For high volume, high performance requirements, we design semiconductor products that meet our customer’s needs for fast response with complex algorithms, compact packaging, and very low power consumption.