52% of US Smart Speaker Owners Are Controlling TV With Voice

75 million people in the US are now using a smart speaker, and more than half of them – 39 million – are using it to control their smart TV, video streamer or other TV device at least weekly. This finding comes from Strategy Analytics’ latest report, 2019 Smart Speaker User Survey – US Results, and is based on a survey of 1136 users of smart speakers carried out in July and August 2019.

Amazon has qualified the VocalFusion 2-mic dev kit for Alexa Voice Services launched by XMOS for smart TVs and set-top boxes in July 2019. The qualification highlights the opportunity for manufacturers to build Amazon Alexa voice capabilities into their products more easily and cost effectively than ever before. Amazon highlights the product’s engineering innovation, enabling lower cost voice capabilities with all the performance of a 4-mic solution, and paving the way for mass market implementation of far-field applications.

The massive growth in the voice assistant market has created a vibrant ecosystem and significant opportunities for hardware and software developers. Total voice software unit shipments are expected to increase significantly to 2024, according to SAR Insight & Consulting. The firm latest report forecasts a larger increase in voice software, especially within home devices such as smart speakers, soundbars, smart TVs and smart appliances.

The IBC show is always an important event to remind us of some key perspectives having to do with audio technology, content production, and distribution, which are at the core of our interests. Just like music is now predominantly available on streaming services, radio and television content are now being distributed over the Internet, while movies and lots of other content is available directly to all of us in multiple platforms and services. This article was published originally in The Audio Voice newsletter.

Conexant’s new I2S audio Codec and AudioSmart software offers noise cancellation and full-duplex acoustic echo cancellation for tablets, allowing better voice quality even in noisy environments. Conexant also introduced a Linux software solution for voice control and communication in smart home products and unveiled its new Smart Voice Pickup (SVP) technology for headsets, based on its proprietary SSP noise suppression algorithm.