19 Jan, 2021
Industry leading audio front end ensures flawless speech recognition regardless of external sound for an optimal user experience
SANTA CLARA, CALIF., JANUARY 19, 2020 – DSP Concepts, whose audio platform powers more than 50 million devices for many of the world’s best consumer and automotive brands, today announced it partnered with Kakao Enterprise to enable the voice user interface in its latest ‘Mini Hexa’ smart speaker (KE-H200). The Mini Hexa is the company’s fourth smart device to be released and uses DSP Concepts’ TalkTo™, a highly adaptable audio front end that eliminates unreferenced sound for far-field voice control in noisy and unpredictable environments. Not only does TalkTo improve speech recognition accuracy, it also supports faster and more stable connectivity across the Mini Hexa’s six microphone system and is fully compatible with Kakao Enterprise’s Kakao i Voice Engine.
“When we started to design the Mini Hexa we knew we needed an audio front end that could more effectively detect user commands even when there’s a TV on or kids playing, and could also support a six-microphone array in such a compact device,” said developers at Kakao Enterprise. “TalkTo checks both of those boxes with the added benefit of automatically optimizing for the smart speaker application, which saved substantial time and engineering bandwidth. We’re very pleased with the end result and are confident we’ll see high sales volume during the holiday season and beyond.”
The Mini Hexa has a hexagon-shaped exterior design and can be easily mounted anywhere in the house thanks to its more compact size and design when compared to the Kakao Mini and Kakao Mini C. The device’s six high-performance microphones powered by TalkTo contain both voice recognition beamforming and echo cancellation functionalities, maximizing the overall voice control performance. TalkTo is also the only commercially scalable solution to multi-channel AEC and is the single best-performing product in the market, cancelling up to 30dB of unreferenced noise.
“Our work with Kakao Enterprise reinforces the value of TalkTo from both a design flexibility and product performance perspective,” said Paul Beckmann, CTO and co-founder of DSP Concepts. “Not only has the pandemic accelerated demand for voice technology, it’s also raised expectations for performance. Today’s consumer expects their smart speaker to hear them from multiple rooms in their home, which is why TalkTo’s far-field voice detection is so valuable for OEMs.”
In addition to its newly compact design and boosted microphone systems, the Mini Hexa’s ability to seamlessly connect with other devices has also been enhanced, and separating the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas improved both network speed and stability.
The Mini Hexa is available for purchase in-stores and online at https://kakao.ai/product/minihexa. For more information on DSP Concepts and TalkTo please visit www.dspconcepts.com.
