Cloud-based voice assistants, led by Amazon’s Alexa, have become common
in many homes, embedded in smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo products.
Soon, the newly emerging trend to build voice assistants directly into smart
devices such as light switches, ceiling fans, appliances, smoke detectors and
thermostats will make voice control ubiquitous throughout the home.
Voice assistants conveniently and unobtrusively located throughout the home enable a
family’s entire network of connected smart devices to be controlled by
voice commands from any room. For example, “Alexa, turn off all the
lights,” or even more powerful routines can be created such as,
“Alexa, good morning,” which can turn on music, start the coffee
pot, adjust the thermostat settings and more.
Today, a few smart home device and appliance makers are introducing versions
of their products with built-in voice assistants. Until now, the technology
required to embed cloud voice assistants has required a powerful multicore
microprocessor unit (MPU), similar to the application processor in smart
phones, with large Flash and SDRAM memories and complex power management.
Such implementations have not been a fit for cost sensitive consumer devices,
which has impeded the proliferation of smart home devices with built-in voice.
At Embedded World this week, NXP Semiconductors announced the first MCU-based
implementation of an Alexa client, based on a new member of NXP’s
popular
i.MX RT crossover MCUs family
of devices. This new solution enables device makers to build Alexa into
products using a low cost, low-power microcontroller unit (MCU), a device that
is typically already required in any connected smart home product, meaning
that OEMs can now add voice to their products at very low incremental cost
(not much more than the cost of the microphones). Running on Amazon FreeRTOS,
NXP’s new
MCU-based AVS solution
leverages the power of AWS IoT Core to minimize the processing resources
needed to build Alexa into a product. Compared to previous implementations
running Linux with large memory footprints, requiring more than 50 MB RAM and
several Giga-Bytes of Flash, NXP’s MCU solution needs less than 1 MB of
on-chip RAM and fewer than 16 MB of Flash, significantly reducing cost and
size.
The
i.MX RT106A
(“ten-sixty-a”) has a 600 MHz Arm™ Cortex-M7™
processor, 1 MB of on-chip SRAM, an LCD display, camera interface, advanced
security and flexible communication, combined with a complete turnkey AVS
software solution and a production ready hardware design to enable OEMs to
quickly and easily add Alexa to their product designs.
With this solution, device makers realize further benefits of shorter time to
market, lower development and lifetime costs. It brings together the Alexa
Voice Service, AWS IoT Core and Amazon FreeRTOS to provide complete and
optimized security, deployment and device monitoring.
NXP’s i.MX RT MCU-based AVS solution
is available as a complete kit for evaluation, development and prototyping.
The hardware consists of two small, 30 mm x 40 mm (1.2” x 1.6”)
boards. The MCU system on module (SoM) carries the
i.MX RT106A processor, 32 MB of Hyper-Flash memory, a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module and an optional NXP
A71CH secure element. The audio board has three MEMS microphones and connects
to a speaker driven by NXP’s TFA9894D smart audio amplifier. The
hardware ships with software that includes everything necessary for a
developer to, out-of-the-box, connect to the Alexa Voice Service and
immediately start prototyping. This one-stop-shop software package includes
far-field voice processing (echo cancellation, noise suppression, beam
forming, barge-in), an Alexa wake word inference engine, an AVS client
application, API and all necessary drivers.
Samples of the
i.MX RT106A processor
and the SLN-ALEXA-IOT solution kit are available to qualified early access
customers now and will be available for sale from NXP and its distributors in
2Q19.
For more information please visit
i.MX RT MCU-based AVS solution.
