As I pen these words, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is in full swing. Even my wife (Gina the Gorgeous) has heard about it, and she has no interest in this sort of thing whatsoever. When I returned home yesterday evening, Gina said she'd heard that there was a big electronics show going on in Las Vegas and why wasn't I there? I started to explain the difference between ESC and CES, but her eyes started to glaze over and then she fell asleep (I'll have to remember this trick for the future).
If the truth be told, I really wish I was at CES because there's always so much to see there. Of course, you can also learn a lot from the comfort of your own home, because all of the companies attending CES send up a barrage of PR releases.
Take those little scamps from Conexant, for example — it seems that every time I blink my eyes they announce something new. For example, a couple of their announcements that caught my eye as follows:
RoomAware Optimizer: On the one hand, the sound coming out of a modern TV is pretty good in the scheme of things. Having said this, no two rooms are alike, and the sound coming out of the TV can be easily distorted by the surrounding environment. Thus, I was interested to hear about this new AudioSmart Solution that can automatically adapt the speaker output from the TV at accommodate the location of the TV in the room and the acoustics of the room.
Voice Control: Ever since I got my Amazon Echo, I've become really excited by the imminent widespread deployment of embedded speech. So I was jolly interested to hear about this Low-Power Audio/Sensor SoC, whose role in life it to bring voice control to battery-operated devices. Take my BADASS Display or my Cunning Chronograph projects, for example — I would love to be able to control these by simply telling them what I want them to do.
Voice Location & Isolation: Voice control is all well and good, but not if you are obliged to put your mouth within inches of the device you wish to control and then wait for a period of silence before uttering your commands. Enter this multi-microphone far-field voice processor, whose 360-degree voice location and speech recognition capabilities support far-field conditions of up to five meters away from the target device.
And remember that these are just a sampling of announcements from only one company. Now I really wish I was at CES so I could meander around seeing all of the cool stuff, and also so I could observe any shenanigans going on, such as the US Marshals' raid on the Changzhou First International Trade company's stand. How about you? Would you like to be at CES? Or are you actually at CES, in which case what can you tell us about everything you've seen?
7 thoughts on “Better TV sound, voice control… I wish I were at CES!”
“Max….it's only about 2000 KM from you, a mere bagatelle in these days of air travel. And to have your wife not only allow you to go but encourage you as well is too good an opportunity to be missed. Trouble is it sounds like you would have to take her
“@Max…in your Amazon echo article you said your mom was pretty taken with Alexa (your Amazon echo) and thought she might like one for christmas. Did that get any further?”
“I don't think they have the Echo fully working in the UK yet — when I bought mine it was more set up to deliver USB-based information — there was talk about bringing out UK and Australian-centric versions, but I never looked any further…”
“Echo is a great proof of concept that uses an open Mic VOIP phone listening onto your home/area which sends the information to Amazon (it can/will forward it to another server if needed). All of the activity is saved on the Amazon servers.nnI receive
“A very long way for Echo…nnI am still wondering who thought that having an open VOIP phone line in ones home would be a good idea. My Echo power is controlled by my NODE-Red server. When Tasker (Android app) detects my phone attaching to my home Wi
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“Max….it's only about 2000 KM from you, a mere bagatelle in these days of air travel. And to have your wife not only allow you to go but encourage you as well is too good an opportunity to be missed. Trouble is it sounds like you would have to take her
“## all you'll hear (from both of you) is “I want one of those!”….nnBe afraid, be very afraid LOL “
“@Max…in your Amazon echo article you said your mom was pretty taken with Alexa (your Amazon echo) and thought she might like one for christmas. Did that get any further?”
“I don't think they have the Echo fully working in the UK yet — when I bought mine it was more set up to deliver USB-based information — there was talk about bringing out UK and Australian-centric versions, but I never looked any further…”
“Echo is a great proof of concept that uses an open Mic VOIP phone listening onto your home/area which sends the information to Amazon (it can/will forward it to another server if needed). All of the activity is saved on the Amazon servers.nnI receive
“I agree — the Echo is great as a concept and as a taste of things to come — but there's still a long way to go.”
“A very long way for Echo…nnI am still wondering who thought that having an open VOIP phone line in ones home would be a good idea. My Echo power is controlled by my NODE-Red server. When Tasker (Android app) detects my phone attaching to my home Wi