The Exynos Processor is Ready for Smart Speaker

As smart speakers are getting more intelligent and affordable, it is quickly becoming one of the must have devices at our homes. With further advancements in intelligent virtual assistant technology and increasing number of controllable smart home and IoT devices, smart speaker’s popularity is expected to grow rapidly. Smart speaker is a great personal assistant for answering questions, playing favorite music and even controlling connected home devices such as air conditioners, lights, etc. Recently, smart speaker has evolved into a smart display that has a camera and a display allowing users to video-chat, watch video clips or feed from security camera, or even do virtual shopping. Introducing the Exynos 7570 reference platform for smart speaker To help device manufacturers reduce development time and enable faster time-to-market, Samsung introduces the reference platform for a smart display and a smart speaker. The reference platform is powered by the Exynos 7 Quad (7570) processor and is comprised of various components that are essential for an outstanding versatility and intelligent virtual assistant service with multimedia contents. The reference platform has an 8” HD LCD display and is made up of four-modular boards (core, front, I/O, and mic) that can be mixed-and-matched to meet various customers’ needs. The main or core board has a highly power efficient and performance proven Exynos 7570 mobile processor which has a quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU, a Mali-T720 GPU, an Wi-Fi, and a Bluetooth integrated in a single chip built on a 14nm FinFET process. The core board also has a PMIC, an eMCP, a compact package of mobile DRAM and eMMC, and a companion RF transceiver IC. The front board comes with a proximity sensor and a camera, the I/O (Input and Output) board with a display, an LED, a speaker, an USB, and an external memory, and the mic board with microphones. Cutting-edge technologies through collaboration with partners To offer a reference platform that supports smart speaker or smart display’s advanced features, Samsung is collaborating closely with the market-leading solutions partners. The reference platform is based on Google’s Android™ 7.0 and supports the market-leading virtual assistant services for an advanced user experience. To ensure such experience, detecting a hot word or voice trigger and understanding the voice commands accurately from anywhere in the room even when surrounded by noise is very important for smart speakers. For voice trigger, the reference platform supports both market leading Sensory's Trulyhandsfree™ solution and POWERVOICE’s algorithm. For seamless voice recognition, the platform is available in two options. The first option uses two microphones and an external digital signal processor (DSP) while the other uses four microphones and speech recognition algorithm running on mobile processor for voice pre-processing. The reference platform utilizes two speech recognition algorithms; POWERVOICE’s speech signal processing technology and MightyWorks’ Speech Recognition Enhancement (SRE™) technology. In addition to voice recognition, Sensory’s TrulySecure™ technology is also available on the platform for secure and precise voice and face registration and authentication. The reference platform’s capabilities are expandable via connecting external dongles that adds features like on-device AI, movement recognition, and gesture control. For on-device artificial intelligence, Gyrfalcon Technology’s Lightspeeur Series Intelligent Neural Processor with 9.3Tops/Watt performance can be added-on. This processor uses Matrix Processing Engine (MPE) architecture to process speech, image and video in parallel with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) enabling powerful Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Furthermore, a dynamic vision sensor module can be attached for movement recognition and gesture control. The Samsung Exynos 7570 smart speaker reference platform has recently been showcased at the Amazon Alexa Summit in Shenzhen, China. The platform, by offering cutting-edge technologies from Samsung and the partners, has been very well received as a highly optimized development platform by the device manufacturers.