Amazon’s Alexa comes to the Raspberry Pi

Makers take heed: A new collaboration between Amazon and Conexant Systems brings voice-controlled virtual assistants to the open-source maker market. The two companies partnered together to launch a pre-configured Alexa Voice Service (AVS) AudioSmart 2-mic Development Kit for smart home applications, empowering developers to integrate the Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service into their unique Raspberry Pi projects.

Using Conexant’s dual-microphone voice-processing solution, makers can equip their projects with microphones sensitive enough to distinguish the “Alexa” wake-up word from noisy conditions, saving the time and effort needed to develop a voice-recognition technology from scratch. Users no longer need to worry about echo cancellation, microphone positioning, or the other acoustic challenges of streamlining voice-recognition technology.

That means less time spent building hardware and more time spent developing and prototyping innovative ideas like building virtual assistant platforms for vehicle or voice-activated smart outlets.

“We created our AVS for Raspberry Pi projects to help expedite the development of Alexa smart home products,” said Steve Rabuchin, Vice President Amazon Alexa. “Conexant’s AudioSmart 2-mic Development Kit for Amazon AVS unlocks serious voice-capture capabilities, allowing developers to achieve a far better AVS user experience through vital voice-processing technologies that overcome acoustic and distance challenges. Utilizing Conexant’s AVS-approved solutions will help third-party manufacturers quickly innovate with Alexa.”

Conexant’s AudioSmart CX20921 Voice Input Processing software is preconfigured to capture the user’s voice from any direction within the room, distinguish voice commands from music even with background noise present, and provide a clean audio signal to the AVS cloud for speech-recognition processing.

Also included is a high-dynamic range analog-to-digital converters (ADC), which supports connections to analog microphones and PDM interfaces for connection to digital MEMS microphones.

For more information on pricing and availability, visit Conexant.