Teenage Engineering, Raven and Baidu's Collaboration on New Smart Speaker Concepts

Baidu, a company known as China's search engine is investing heavily in its own voice engine, artificial intelligence (AI), and even hardware technologies, following Google's footsteps. Earlier this year, Baidu acquired Raven, a Beijing-based smart home startup, and the first results of that investment have now been revealed with two voice-activated speakers that run on the company's own AI platform. The design was the result of a cooperation with a Swedish start-up, Teenage Engineering.

In previous editorials, I have highlighted the important role of smart speakers in promoting the user case for voice personal assistants (VPAs) and voice recognition applications - given the ideal combination of far-field microphone arrays with a complete audio ecosystem that encompasses digital signal processing, acoustic echo cancelation, noise cancellation, and many other technologies. This opens significant opportunities for the audio industry, given we understand the challenges.

IBM unveiled an experimental release of Project Intu, a new, system-agnostic platform designed to enable embodied cognition. The new platform allows developers to embed IBM Watson artificial intelligence functions into various end-user device form factors, offering a next generation architecture for building cognitive-enabled experiences. The initiative allows developers to extend Watson speech, language, vision and empathy capabilities to new form factors.