Picovoice, an Offline Voice Recognition SDK, Adds Support for Arduino Boards
Operating entirely offline, Picovoice is now available on microcontrollers as well as microcomputers.
Picovoice, the offline speech recognition and wake word detection specialist, has shown off a new feather in its cap: support for Arduino-compatible microcontrollers.
Picovoice announced its wake word and speech-to-intent software development kit, which offers support for fully-offline operation, two years ago with a demonstration of it running on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. The latest version, though, extends the same capabilities to microcontrollers — despite their considerably more constrained resources.
"Did you know it’s now possible to perform high-accuracy speech recognition on a microcontroller," Picovoice's Mohammadreza Rostam writes in the introduction to a demonstration of just that, brought to our attention by CNX Software. "Advances in machine learning have brought voice capability to these extremely resource-constrained devices, via the Picovoice SDK. Arduino recently joined the list of supported devices, starting with the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense."
In the brief demo write-up, Rostam shows a sketch which detects the wake word — "Picovoice" — then establishes the intent from a simple sentence: "Make the blue light blink ten times quickly." A sample project to achieve just that with an Arduino Nano 33 BLE's on-board LED is provided.
The Picovoice SDK is provided as a library for the Arduino IDE, and the Arduino Nano 33 BLE includes an on-board microphone and LED — meaning the demo works with no additional hardware. The context model, however, has to be generated outside the IDE using the Picovoice Console — a tool that runs in-browser and provides a model for import into the Arduino sketch.
More information, and links to source code and documentation, is available on Rostam's Medium post.