Whisper Trigger – An Ultra-low Power Voice Detector

For long period of time, we were using our muscles and bodies to control various machines. However, with the growth of technology, things became much easier. We moved to the use of keypads and buttons to get jobs done. Today, touchscreens have appeared and made everything very simple to use. But we did not get enough, and the near future will be for the voice commands.
Using voice commands implies the need to use detection systems and circuits, which must provide high accuracy results, reliable at both near and far distances, not affected by noise, simultaneously sensitive, fast, and also have low power consumption. Power consumption is very important factor nowadays, especially with the application of Internet of Things (IoT) devices which are powered using batteries and have to work for long time.
Most of current solutions for voice recognition use digital signal processors (DSPs) connected with A/D converters and they work in permanent wake mode which make them consume high amounts of  power in case of IoT applications and smartphones.
Dolphin Integration, a French corporation works on enabling low-power Systems-on-Chip and provides a solution called “Whisper Trigger”, an ultra-low power voice detector with outstanding performance of detection, enabling wake-up voice acquisition and recognition when needed. In comparison with other devices, this technology reduces power consumption by 80-90%. It consumes only 20 µA, and needs just 1 millisecond to wake up.
Dolphin Integration provides also another solution for text recognition and detection of keywords, the Microelectromechanical System (MEMS) which should be connected to DSP and circular buffer to perform the process of conversion, decimation and filtering.
 
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