Interactive Voice Hoping to Ride Siri Wave of Voice-Recognition

Interactive Voice will be at CES with its voice-recognition alarm clocks under the ivee brand as part of a move into the whole home, CEO Jonathon Nostrant told us Thursday. The company’s alarm clocks are its entry into voice-recognition but the company is eying more sophisticated home control products in the near future, Nostrant said.

The trend in voice-control is toward being “more personal,” Nostrant said, and Interactive Voice is headed into the personal assistant voice-controlled space popularized by Apple’s Siri. The ivee product line is based on a newer, faster chip and “we're hopefully looking at big growth because of the popularity of voice control right now,” he said. Siri is “just hitting the tip of the iceberg” of voice-recognition potential, he said, and has elevated voice-recognition technology in consumers’ minds “100 percent.” Where voice-recognition products have been on the fringe of geek technology, “Siri is going to help this category tremendously,” he said. “It’s going to regain confidence from the consumer."

Voice-recognition was a hot topic 30 years ago but was limited by processing power and network capacity, Nostrant said. He cited Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud system that offers scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud with massive processing capability that makes advanced speech-recognition technology possible. “Speech recognition today is so much better than it was years ago because it’s all being processed in the cloud,” where computers can be “clustered together to process a lot of information very quickly,” he said. With processing power no longer a limiting factor, the most important differentiating feature of voice-recognition systems today is “how you handle the recognition afterward,” Nostrant said. It’s up to the natural language parser to interpret sounds correctly based on sentence structure and other cues, he said. The engine behind the ivee clock is the Natural Language Processor, a 16-bit DSP microcontroller from Sensory, Nostrant said.

Nostrant called ivee alarm clocks “completely hands-free” compared with some Bluetooth headsets on the market that require a user to press a button to engage “hands-free” voice control,” he said. Commands are triggered by the phrase “hello, ivee,” which activates the unit. Users can say “snooze” or “shut off the alarm” to control the unit, he said. When the alarm is turned off, ivee announces the time, date and temperature, although the temperature is that of the room, not the outside reading, he said. But ivee’s vision is “to become more integrated with the home” and that includes integration with hardware devices such as temperature sensors, he said, declining to go into more detail.

For now for the basic alarm clocks, ivee is relying on simple commands. Down the road, “we hope to extend more capabilities in our products that will allow you to say a wider variety of sentences,” Nostrant said. He envisions ivee becoming “the voice-control solution for the home” and “the portal, eventually, to your cloud via Wi-Fi,” he said. The pieces are there, but putting it all together will “take time,” he said.