Sensory Teams With Appliance OEMS For Smart Voice Platform

With a specialized model of its TrulyNatural vocabulary speech-recognition and natural-language-understanding platform, Silicon Valley firm Sensory unveiled the release of its domain-specific assistant for smart appliances. The technology will help manufacturers make a new wave of smart kitchen appliances that don’t send voice requests to the cloud, the company said in an announcement.

Sensory CEO Todd Mozer said, “There are certain products where having a cloud-connected voice assistant capable of playing music, checking the weather and telling you a joke makes sense, but there are countless products where it would be unnecessary. TrulyNatural is the perfect solution for device makers that want to create powerful products capable of understanding and responding to spoken commands, but don’t need the added complexity, component costs and potential privacy risks associated with leveraging a cloud-based voice services platform.”

Voice adoption in consumer electronics keeps gaining much traction, but more privacy concerns come to light as more products enabled by cloud-based voice services come to market.

According to the announcement, “TrulyNatural is the perfect solution for addressing these consumer concerns, because it enhances products with an extremely intelligent natural-language user interface, while keeping voice data private and secure. Voice requests never leave the device, nor are they ever stored.”

As it stands, TrulyNatural offers a flexible voice UI that can become integrated into devices of all shapes and sizes. Home microwave appliance company Midea is the first customer to adopt this technology into its products. Both firms will display a new microwave oven at CES 2020 that can understand naturally spoken requests “without sending a single bit of data over the internet,” per the announcement.

Midea MCA Deputy Director Dr. Scott Sun said, “When it comes to scientific and technological innovation in the home appliances industry, Midea is committed to play a leadership role. We firmly believe in ‘consumer-first technology,’ and strive to maintain a technological advantage through teamwork and innovation. By teaming up with Sensory, we are able to not only modernize the consumer experience offered by our products, but do so in a way that addresses the increasingly alarming privacy issue that concerns many consumers worldwide.”