Baidu, Alibaba roll embedded voice services
Rick Merritt, EETimes, Jul. 06, 2017 –
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Two of China's Web giants tapped domestic and U.S. chip partners for embedded voice software and services competing with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Their efforts mark a new front in the war over an emerging market for natural-language and machine-learning services targeting everything from cars to thermostats.
Alibaba announced its Tmall Genie, similar to Amazon's Echo, using silicon from China's C-Sky. Rival Baidu announced two- and four-mic far-field reference design for its DuerOS software using Mediatek and Conexant chips as well as support for Nvidia's Shield TV streaming device. It had previously shown DuerOS running on chips from Shanghai-based RDA Microelectronics.