Arduino UNO Q Owners Get a New App Lab with Speech Recognition, a "Mission Control," and More

Arduino UNO Q owners have a new upgrade to enjoy, with the Arduino App Lab reaching version 0.6 — an update that brings with it a "mission control" page, three new "Bricks" including automatic speech recognition (ASR), and one-click retraining for Edge Impulse machine learning models.

"We're excited to announce Arduino App Lab 0.6, a release that makes managing your Arduino UNO Q board easier, extends your creative toolkit, and brings AI [Artificial Intelligence] capabilities right to your fingertips," the Arduino team writes of the latest version of the software. "The standout feature in 0.6 is the new board settings page. Think of it as mission control for your UNO Q: everything you need to know about your board in one place. At a glance, you can see your firmware version, operating system details, and whether updates are available."

The Arduino UNO Q was unveiled at the same time as the company announced its acquisition by Qualcomm, and marks a major departure from the UNO norm: rather than a microcontroller development board, it's a fully-fledged single-board computer capable of tethered or standalone use — running a custom Linux-based operating system on top of a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 system-on-chip with an STMicroelectronics STM32U575 coprocessor for real-time workloads.

Getting those two halves of what Arduino calls a "dual-brain architecture" to talk to each other is the job of the Arduino App Lab, an integrated development environment specific to the Arduino UNO Q and upcoming Arduino VENTUNO Q that allows you to develop for both the microprocessor and microcontroller sides at the same time — while also adding integration with Edge Impulse Studio for on-device machine learning.

The new App Lab has more than just the "mission control" page, too. The latest release brings with it three new "Bricks," libraries that can be used to add functionality to your programs: the Sound Generator Brick, the Telegram Bot Brick, and the Automatic Speech Recognition (Cloud) Brick, which the Arduino team promises can deliver voice-controlled projects with ease — so long as you don't mind the audio being sent off for processing on a remote cloud system. All Bricks now include a usage example, too, to ease beginners' journeys. Finally, the update also brings easier one-click retraining for Edge Impulse machine learning models.

The latest Arduino App Lab is now available for free download on the Arduino website, though you'll need an Arduino UNO Q to use it.