Many portable devices today are equipped with built in speech-recognition systems like Apple’s Siri®, Microsoft’s Cortana or Google Now™. These enable users to do anything hands-free- from sending text messages to finding the nearest coffee shop on your route to work.
Their ability to recognize and process speech is truly impressive, but they have one key limitation: these applications aren’t always active because they are processor intensive and consume a lot of power listening for, and recognizing speech. If they were “always-listening”, the battery life of your device (which arguably is the limiting factor of most consumer electronic devices today) would be noticeably impacted. To conserve power, these applications must either be manually woken up or placed into a “speech-recognition mode”- either of which still requires the user to physically touch the device.
BelaSigna® R281 from ON Semiconductor enables “always-on” hands-free voice wakeup for consumer electronics. Operating at an average power consumption of less than 300 µW, BelaSigna R281 is an ultra-low-power solution which can be “always listening” without impacting standby battery life.
BelaSigna R281’s audio pattern-matching algorithm can recognize any single, user-trained trigger phrase. This trigger phrase can be any collection of sounds or words, in any language. It can be anything from a whistling noise to “Abracadabra”. When the trigger phrase is detected, BelaSigna R281 asserts a wake-up signal on an output pin that can be connected to any external host controller, effectively bringing it out of standby mode and launching those power hungry (and extremely capable) speech recognition engines.
To provide a real-world example of the benefits of BelaSigna R281, imagine you are driving in your car and are having trouble finding your destination. Today, you would need to pull over and manually (and safely) unlock your device before accessing directions. With a BelaSigna R281-enabled smartphone, you would simply say your personalized trigger phrase, then seamlessly ask your device for directions to your destination using its built-in speech-recognition software. This process is much simpler, more convenient, and most importantly; safer and entirely hands-free.
BelaSigna R281 is now available in 5mm x 5mm QFN packaging. An ultra-miniature WLCSP version is set for release in December.