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Intel unveils developer kit for third party Alexa devices

The chip giant said the Speech Enabling Developer Kit provides a complete audio front-end solution for far-field voice control.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
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Intel unveiled a new development kit that aims to bring voice-control capabilities from Amazon's Alexa to more third-party smart home devices.

The chip giant said the Speech Enabling Developer Kit provides a complete audio front-end solution for far-field voice control.

The developer kit includes Intel's dual digital signal processor with an inference engine and an eight-mic circular array. The system also utilizes algorithms for acoustic echo cancellation, noise reduction, beamforming, and custom wake word engine tuned to "Alexa."

"There's a lot of engineering involved in getting speech recognition at high degrees of speed and accuracy to deliver the best customer experiences," said Miles Kingston, general manager of Intel's smart home group, in a statement: "The Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit is based on a new architecture that delivers high-quality far-field voice even in the most acoustically challenging environments."

For Intel, the kit is part of the company's ongoing focus on the smart home market, as well as its continuing partnership with Amazon. The two tech giants teamed up a year ago on a reference design for Alexa-based products. At the time, Intel said it was on a mission to to help deliver highly-responsive, near-autonomous conversational AI within the home.

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