HiChips Parrot Board Boasts 3-Mic Array in 96Boards’ Form Factor

Back at the beginning of 2018, Allwinner and SinoVoIP released their Allwinner SoC-Only 3-Mic Far-Field Dev Kit that supported Amazon’s AVS (Alexa Voice Service) and sold for $129. Fast forward a year, and Allwinner has teamed up with another company — Shenzhen Kepuhao Electronic Technology, to bring about a 96Boards CE Extended form factor HiChips Parrot 3-mic development kit that’s similar to the original. The only difference is the addition of 96Boards’ LS and HS connectors, which are featured on nearly all of their platforms.

As far as hardware goes, the HiChips Parrot sports an Allwinner R18 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor with Mali-400MP2 GPU, 1Gb of DDR3, and 8Gb of eMMC. The board packs 3X microphones, 2X AEC, and support for the GMEMS voice recognition algorithm. Rounding out the board is an HDMI port, audio port, 2X USB Type-A port, 1X micro USB OTG port, and 96Boards’ Low-Speed/High-Speed headers.

The HiChips Parrot can take advantage of Linux and hosts everything needed to get the board up and running with AVS. Now for the good news and the bad news- the HiChips Parrot is currently priced at $79.99 (plus shipping) and can be found on Alibaba and 1688.com ($82.58). The bad news is that they are being sold in groups of 10 only at this point, and it’s currently unknown if that will change in the near future. My guess is that 96Boards will have more details about the board at some point, so check with them for any updates.