Audience NUE N100/Credit: Audience
Audience on Monday lifted the curtain on NUE, a new line of "multi-sensory" processors for mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) implementations, which combine voice and motion awareness in a single solution.
Already known for its leadership in advanced voice processing, Audience last year acquired Sensor Platforms, a developer of context awareness software for smartphones, to add to its portfolio of natural interface technologies and sensor-processing capabilities.
MWC Bug ArtNUE stands for "Natural User Experience." The first NUE product is the N100, which Audience unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It combines the company's VoiceQ voice signal processing component and MotionQ, the motion awareness and sensor hub processing technology Audience has been developing since acquiring Sensory Platforms.
Audience is positioning its future range of NUE products for use in smartphones, wearables, and IoT devices. The N100 targets smartphones and the company said it should start appearing in handsets before the end of the year.
VoiceQ's big selling point is that it's always on, allowing smartphone users to wake up their devices and perform tasks with parametrically defined key phrases, while "dramatically lowering false acceptance rates," according to Audience.
That's important, because when a non-key phrase wakes a phone up accidentally, it chews up a lot of battery power, according to Kevin Shaw, director of marketing in Audience's software group.
"You can consume up to 1,000 milliwatts per false alarm screen light-up," he told PCMag.
Shaw, who was chief technology officer at Sensor Platforms before Audience acquired the company last July, also explained what the integration of MotionQ to the N100.
MotionQ provides devices with the ability to understand the context of how they're being used and in what surroundings, judging with high accuracy if a user is "walking, talking, sleeping, driving, etc.," Shaw said. That's done by processing data collected by an accelerometer and a gyroscope in the N100 implementation, but Audience has even bigger plans for MotionQ and its NUE line going forward.
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The NUE family of products include a general-purpose sensor-processing hub that Audience believes will make the product line attractive to not just smartphone makers, but designers of wearables and IoT devices as well.
The sensor hub in the N100 "aggregates inputs from sensors, passes data in a consolidated stream, potentially without pre-processing," while a technology Audience calls Sensor Fusion "combines data from disparate sources such that resulting fused information is better than possible when used separately," Shaw said.
"So basically, the sensor hub takes the load off the application processor. What we're doing with NUE is combining the capabilities of an AP and a sensor hub," he said.