News

Talking, listening phones and toys will have CSR Bluetooth chip

A week after announcing its billionth Bluetooth chip, Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) has released details of a new Bluecore which can talk; and can also recognise speech.

Full details of the upgrade to Bluecore5 -Multimedia were given in today's press release, which can't, of course, indicate how much speech this processor can cope with, or how accurate it may be.  But it may not have to be spectacularly sophisticated to be useful.

As the official release says: "Speech recognition allows users to easily and safely control a vast array of functions through voice commands, including call acceptance and rejection, voice dialling, and music control and selection."

The technology used is Rubidium hardware, not software; there's a detailed white paper in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format, format about how speech recognition "moved from software to hardware" dating back two years.

That paper quotes Rubidium founder Shlomo Peller, CEO saying that speech chips "typically include a preamplifier to increase the strength of input signals from the microphone, analog-to-digital and digitalto-analog converters, direct-memoryaccess
units for better data handling, and a vector accelerator and hardware
multiplier for improved performance. Hardware handles the various parts of the speech-recognition process in parallel, which speeds up the work."

The Rubidium technology has been available for CSR chip users for some time - the difference is that now, it's integrated on the CSR silicon. However, to drive a phone, this chip still needs to be integrated into the software of the phone (or other Bluetooth device) which is going to be commanded, or which is going to talk back. Much of that work has been done by many phone makers, but people making new toys will probably have some time to wait before they can actually ship talking, listening products.

The official text of the  press announcement is here

http://www.csr.com/pr/pr329.htm