Sensory Launches Ultra-Compact Speech Recognition Technology for Embedded Applications

Acquisition of Fluent-Speech Technologies Leads to Technical Renassance at Sensory

Santa Clara, CA. January 4, 2005. ...Sensory, Inc., the world leader in embedded speech technologies today debuts FluentChip™ technology for the RSC line of microcontrollers. Also premiering is FluentSoft™ technology, which is available to be licensed to other manufacturers for use on other hardware platforms. FluentChip™ and FluentSoft™ came to Sensory from the acquisition of Fluent Speech Technologies, a group of academics out of the Oregon Graduate Institute’s (OGI) Center for Speech and Language Understanding. The new technologies will be demonstrated at CES in Las Vegas, January 6-9, in Sensory’s meeting room #36079.

Dr. Pieter Vermeulen, a former OGI professor and now Sensory’s director of technology, joined Sensory as part of the merger. The Fluent team, led by Dr. Vermeulen on the FluentSoft™ side and Dr. Robert Savoie on the FluentChip™ side, have spent over four years perfecting a technology that requires as little as 20K of memory to recognize a word set with extremely high accuracy, speaker independence and reasonable tolerance for ambient noise.

“Sensory’s reputation for excellence has been honed over the years, with customers such as Sony, Fisher-Price, Mattel, Sharper Image and many others with impeccable credentials for quality choosing Sensory speech technologies,” notes Todd Mozer, Sensory CEO. “Our new approach overcomes industry-wide obstacles by bringing down the cost of superior accuracy and noise tolerance to a point where high-quality speech recognition can be easily and reliably designed into even the lowest-cost lines of consumer products.”

RSC Line of Microcontrollers Includes FluentChip Technology
Sensory’s RSC line of speech I/O microcontrollers now run the FluentChip™ firmware. These low-cost IC’s sell for under $2 in volume, and can handle active vocabularies of up to 40 speaker-independent words. All the necessary ROM, RAM and hardware options are contained on chip, including a general-purpose microcontroller and powerful 16-bit A/D converter. By replacing an existing non-speech microcontroller, Sensory can add speech input and output, with an incremental cost of under $1. This opens up the technology to a new generation of consumer products, with user interface features that were never before affordable.

Fast, Easy Development Tools Cut Development Costs by Orders of Magnitude
New language development tools featuring FluentChip™ cut speech development time from months to hours on the RSC platform. World class C-compilers, assemblers, debuggers and emulators offer inexpensive ways to prototype and implement speech recognition into any conceivable consumer application FluentSoft™ is available as a complete Software Development Kit and is compatible with a number of popular DSP’s, microcontrollers and various operating systems. FluentSoft™ is designed to work on a cell phone platform and can recognize over 600 names and continuous digits, even in a noisy environment.