An announcement from Sensory stated that the BlueGenie Lite, a speech output solution for BlueTooth devices, is now available and it runs on the industry's most popular chipsets, CSR's ( News - Alert) BlueCore 3 and BlueCore 5.
Last fall the complete BlueGenie Voice Interface was released but the new Lite version concentrates on the software capabilities to focus on voice output only, enabling voice menu's and prompts to improve usability and reduce user confusion for a wider range of Bluetooth headsets and hands-free car kits.
Sensory, is a provider of speech technologies for consumer products offering a complete line of IC and software-only solutions for speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker verification, music synthesis and more.
BlueTooth handsets usually have flashes and beeps to prompt the user and it can be difficult for the user to infer them. The BlueGenie Lite provides voice prompts for the user thereby avoiding their confusion. The voice prompts have multiple language capabilities and also provide for customized accents or personalities. For example, the voice of a teen idol could be used as an interface for a product targeting teens. Headset manufacturers can easily implement these features to enable fast differentiation and appeal to a broad range of geographies and customers worldwide.
The BlueGenie Lite can be easily navigated to select key operations such as redialing the last caller, storing a quick-dial number, checking the battery level, or reestablishing a lost connection. It is specially designed for cost sensitive handsets. As the most popular feature, the voice prompt will reveal the caller ID phone number or name of an incoming call, thus letting users keep their eyes safely on the road while driving.
Ajit Deosthali, the research manager for short range wireless at IDC ( News - Alert), commented, "The Bluetooth headset market is expected to triple over the next two years and intuitive voice control is a must-have feature to enable ease-of-use for customers and a differentiation opportunity for headsets OEMs. Sensory' BlueGenie Lite is a step forward in applying greater usability through voice to a more comprehensive product portfolio for headset OEMs."
"We see simple voice menus and prompts taking over as the desired user interface of the lower end Bluetooth headset market over the next several years. BlueGenie Lite enables a dramatic improvement in user friendliness with minimal impact on headset cost," said Todd Mozer, president and CEO of Sensory. "For more feature-rich headsets, we expect our BlueGenie Voice Interface to continue its lead and become the dominant solution for the most user-friendly 'eyes-free and hands-free' headset experiences possible."
The speech output on the BlueGenie Lite is based on Sensory's proprietary SX compression and synthesis technology. Through this, it can provide high quality voice with lower data transfer rate. Implementation with 20 seconds of prompts requires approximately 27 Kbytes of code/constant memory and 2 Kbytes data RAM, which allows the complete solution to fit into most headset systems. The power requirements are also very low thus extending battery life.
Sensory is making BlueGenie Lite available now to headset OEMs, and has developed a "plug-in" architecture to fit into the CSR source code libraries.
Nathesh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Nathesh’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
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