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KITT.AI Teams up with Amazon to Enable Voice Control for Devices Using the "Alexa" Wake WordKITT.AI today announced they are teaming up with Amazon to enable developers to more easily build voice-controlled products using the Alexa Voice Service (AVS (News - Alert)). With KITT.AI's Snowboy hotword detection engine, developers building Alexa-enabled products with AVS will now be able to simply wake their devices by saying "Alexa." The AVS for hands-free Raspberry Pi project, available on GitHub, marks the first time a third-party wake word solution that uses Alexa will be available for free to developers. KITT.AI is developing a deep bench of conversation-driven interfaces for developers. Their first product Snowboy, enables any developer to integrate wake words. Wake words are verbal commands that wake a device or tell it to do something. Snowboy is powered by KITT.AI's deep neural network technology that directly learns from and recognizes unique patterns in wake words' voiceprints. "The Alexa Voice Service was designed to allow device manufacturers to bring the power of voice to their products. We've been impressed with KITT.AI's innovative work and invested early in the company through the Alexa Fund. The announcement today signifies the continuation of that relationship and we're excited that the Snowboy hotword detection engine will make it even easier for developers to integrate Alexa into their devices," said Aaron Brown, Director, Amazon Alexa. "Snowboy has received strong support from the developer community and we are excited to work with Amazon as they continue to innovate with Alexa," said Xuchen Yao, co-founder and CEO of KITT.AI. "As a library for user-specific hotwords, Snowboy now has more than 2000 registered developers and 1000 unique hotwords." Developers interested in checking out KITT.AI's Snowboy should visit https://snowboy.kitt.ai. Snowboy was released earlier this year and represents the first time hotword detection capabilities have been made available to the developer community as a free, easy-to-use, customizable platform. Snowboy is designed to let developers easily define, create, and detect their own hotwords. It needs as little as three voice samples to get started, providing quick proof-of-concept for applications without sacrificing accuracy. About KITT.AI KITT.AI offers Conversational Understanding as a Service. It is a Seattle-based startup focusing on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies and NLU-enabled user interfaces. KITT.AI's products enable developers to quickly solve both simple NLU tasks such as hotword detection and complex NLU tasks such as multi-turn dialogue systems. KITT.AI is supported by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Amazon Alexa Fund, Founders' Co-op and Madrona Venture Group.
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