Last month Sensory hosted its annual Rep Fair. Once a year, we invite all of our sales and distribution reps from around the world to attend this conference to talk about our new products and technologies.
In past, we have had over two dozen attendees at these conferences, and have rented out large hotel meeting rooms for multiple days of activities. With the down economy, we scaled back a bit and hosted this year’s Rep Fair at a Sensory meeting room. Fifteen people representing eight countries attended, which is not bad considering the doom & gloom economy, but that’s not what I wanted to write about…
This year we demonstrated a few new products featuring Sensory technologies that are just now hitting the market. One of these is the Moshi IVR Alarm Clock by Moshi Lifestyle which uses our Natural Time Set technology. This clock allows a person to set the time and alarms by voice, using simple phrases like “8:45 AM”. This is a pretty tough grammar task for Sensory’s entry level chips which use only 2K RAM and less than 10 MIPS of processing, but the speech recognition is flawless and the product is excellent.
For fun we left the “voice trigger” mode on during the entire two days of nonstop meetings, presentations, and discussions. The voice trigger mode (or continuous listening), is one of the toughest tasks a speech recognizer can do, because the listening window is completely unconstrained, and everything spoken must be analyzed, with the right trigger phrase being responded to and the wrong words or phrases being rejected.
For this clock the trigger is “Hello Moshi.” I was expecting the clock to false trigger about once every hour, which would have been normal for an older technology release. However, our latest code is more finely tuned and calibrated for noisy environments, and after about four hours with no false triggers, I just had to check to see if it was even still on. So in the middle of a presentation on Sensory’s new VPC chip (not yet announced!), I said “Hello Moshi”…low and behold Moshi responded. It was on and listening the whole time, but never false triggered.
We went a full 2 days with no false triggers, and all the Sensory employees and old time reps were blown away!