If you have any experience with the Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, or Google Home voice-activated assistants (and you probably do), you have most likely gotten the sense that the way we interact with many of our electronic devices is changing dramatically. As we have been saying for the last year or so, “voice is the new touch”. In other words, instead of touching a button or swiping a screen or typing on a keyboard – we have begun to talk to our electronics to tell them what we want them to do for us.

The combination of voice commands and cloud-based artificial intelligence is particularly powerful. Now you can have your local device recognize a trigger word, connect to the cloud, and then decode and execute a fairly complex instruction. This capability will only get better over time.

Fortunately, we recognized this trend early and have included voice recognition capability in our devices such as the EOS™ S3 Sensor Processing Platform. That fact has enabled our customers to quickly and easily develop their own voice-activated products, or to upgrade existing products by adding a new voice control capability. Because our devices also feature ultra-low power consumption, choosing our solution (especially for battery powered applications) is that much easier.

The latest example comes from our customer GGEC. They have used our EOS S3 device to develop a voice-enabled Bluetooth sport earphone which provides always-on hands-free voice control via a dedicated voice trigger. The ultra-low power consumption of the EOS S3 allows the earphone to deliver long battery life to the end customer before they need to recharge.

The GGEC design is one of the designs with app companies that we have mentioned in our recent earnings calls. As we describe in the recent press release we’ve issued, this particular design win is significant as the sport earphone is associated with Tencent and their new cloud-based digital assistant service called DingDang. (For those of you who may not know, Tencent is an internet services holding company in China which recently became the first company in Asia to surpass a $500B market cap.)

Even though our customer’s product is actually quite complex and provides wireless connectivity to even more powerful technology in the form of cloud-based AI services, GGEC was able to complete their development effort in just three months. That’s an amazing cycle time from concept to production for such a leading-edge product and a real testament to the level of capability we were able to deliver to them in the form of the EOS S3 SoC. They got a complete voice-activated solution from us with low power consumption and high quality technical support, their customers will get a great product with incredible functionality, and we get another nice design win driven by the trend towards voice-activated electronics. Good news all the way around.

If you’re interested in learning a bit more about GGEC and their product, you can read our press release here.