Seeed Studio Taps XMOS' XVF3800 for a New, "AI-Powered" ReSpeaker Microphone Array

Seeed Studio has announced a new version of its ReSpeaker microphone array, the four-mic ReSpeaker XVF3800 — promising clear vocal pickup even in noisy environments, thanks to an XMOS VocalFusion XVF3800 at its heart.

"In recent years, artificial intelligence has transformed various industries, with vision AI being at the forefront of these advancements. But what about Voice AI," asks Seeed's Elena Tang by way of introduction to the company's latest ReSpeaker device. "Voice, like vision, plays a crucial role in our everyday lives, from understanding conversations to detecting significant events such as a baby crying or glass breaking. Voice AI aims to revolutionize how we interact with audio by improving voice quality, isolating specific target voices, and recognizing key events."

All that is to say: the ReSpeaker XVF3800 four-microphone array is being positioned as an "AI-powered" gadget capable of providing clear voice pickup in even noisy environments. The trick: an XMOS XVF3800 chip, a microphone array processor with integrated audio processing — not directly referred to as "AI" by XMOS itself, but arguably a form of tinyML — for acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, automatic gain control, and beamforming.

This latter is perhaps the chip's most impressive feature: using direction of arrival (DOA), obtained by positioning the four microphone inputs equidistant to each other, to perform multiple adaptive beamforming, focusing only on a speaker and ignoring incidental noises. This, XMOS says, works with both stationary and non-stationary voice sources — and can be disabled in favor of manually-controlled beamforming instead.

Seeed has announced three versions of the ReSpeaker XVF3800: the first is just the circular microphone array itself, priced at $49.90 including a $5 pre-order discount; the second, priced at $54.90 including discount, adds an Espressif ESP32-S3-powered XIAO ESP32S3 development board, pre-installed on a header at the top of the microphone array to expand its capabilities; and finally a $53.90 discounted bundle that includes a sleek black case makes it easier to deploy the array as a ready-to-use USB desktop accessory.

All three models are now available to order on the Seeed Studio store, with hardware expected to ship in the next couple of weeks.