Talk to the Hand(held)

Toying around with custom artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice assistants is an endless source of fun for many hobbyists. But after a while, those custom devices with bare circuit boards and tangles of wires start to lose their charm. That's when the time has come to step it up and buy a more polished device. The trick is to find something that is open source, so you don’t have to give up on hacking just to have something that is more presentable for display in your home.

A hardware-accelerated machine learning handheld called Edgi-Talk that recently popped up on Crowd Supply may be just the sort of device to fit the bill in these situations. It has the external polish of a commercial device, plenty of edge computing horsepower, and the software, firmware, and circuit design are all fully open source. It has all the makings of a great voice assistant, sensor hub, or other smart home gadget.

Edgi-Talk is powered by Infineon’s new high-performance, low-power AI-enabled PSOC Edge E84 that comes equipped with Arm Cortex M55 and M33 processor cores running at 400 MHz and 200 MHz, respectively. The chip also comes standard with an Arm Ethos-U55 neural processing unit to accelerate the execution of AI workloads. 128 MB of PSRAM and a further 128 MB of QSPI-Flash memory give the system the oomph it needs to run complex algorithms locally.

A 4.3-inch MIPI-DSI high-definition capacitive touchscreen display dominates the front of the device, and enables the development of a very nice user interface for your applications. A dual-band Wi-Fi 6 / BLE 6.0 radio makes wireless connectivity a snap, and digital microphones and a speaker driven by a 1 W amplifier round out the interface. USB-HS, TF, DAP/Trace, I²C, UART, SPI, and a Raspberry Pi 40-pin header are all available for interfacing with external devices.

Power is supplied via a USB-C connection, and there is also a 500 mAh lithium battery onboard for portable use. There is no word yet on the cost or expected delivery date, but you can sign up for updates if you are interested in finding out more.