CEVA Introduces WhisPro™, Neural Network-Based Speech Recognition Technology For Voice Assistants and IoT devices

Trigger Phrase SDKit for always-on devices extends CEVA’s intelligent sound IP portfolio, offering customers a holistic solution for voice-controlled devices such as smartphones, smart speakers, Bluetooth® earbuds and more.

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Consumer Electronics Show — CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA), the leading licensor of signal processing platforms and artificial intelligence processors for smarter, connected devices, today introduced WhisPro™, a Neural Network based speech recognition technology targeting the rapidly growing use of voice as a primary human interface for intelligent cloud-based services and edge devices.

Leveraging CEVA’s vast expertize in low power voice and audio processing, WhisPro is an always-listening multi-trigger phrase technology allowing users of new smartphones, smart speakers, Bluetooth® earbuds and other voice-enabled devices to interact with cloud-based voice assistant services, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Baidu DuerOS and others. CEVA provides its customers with a trigger phrase customization service to enable voice control for a range of use cases and end markets, including automotive, smart home, and enterprise. CEVA will showcase WhisPro at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2019 in Las Vegas.

WhisPro operates in tandem with CEVA’s ClearVox front-end voice processing software technology and offers its customers a robust CEVA DSP-based hardware and software solution for speech recognition. This holistic integration of voice pre-processing and neural network algorithms delivers a high recognition rate of more than 95%, while consuming minimal computing resources and power. The technology shows resilience even in noisy environments in both near field and far field use-cases. WhisPro technology operates locally on the edge device, without the need for cloud back up, thereby maintaining user privacy and providing instantaneous response with minimal latency.

Erez Bar-Niv, Chief Technology Officer at CEVA, commented: “Voice has rapidly become the human interface of choice for the intelligent device revolution, yet is one of the most complex technologies to implement. In designing WhisPro, we have capitalized on our low power DSP cores and our in-house noise reduction and echo cancelation algorithms to provide our customers with a complete speech recognition technology that is cost-efficient, highly-accurate and noise-immune. It supports edge and cloud-based voice assistant services and also enables customers to implement their own proprietary trigger phrases to control their devices.”

Based on speech AI technology and optimized specifically for edge devices, WhisPro’s scalable Recurrent Neural Network technology is capable of recognizing multiple trigger phrases, simultaneously. The WhisPro SDKit provides customers with guidelines and tools to integrate and test the WhisPro technology in their system. WhisPro supports multiple pronunciations of keywords and multiple languages, per customer request, with English available now and Mandarin Chinese available shortly.

WhisPro is available for licensing today, exclusively for CEVA-TeakLite-4, CEVA-X2 and CEVA-BX DSP customers, and is compliant with the main tier-1 voice assistant services. For more information, visit: https://www.ceva-dsp.com/product/ceva-whispro/.