CES Innovation: Expanding the Market for Ultra Far-Field Voice Capture and Control Technology
Q&A with Yukuh Tung.
Yukuh Tung, Senior Director of Business Development & Sales Engineering, recently returned from the CES show in Las Vegas. Here are his observations on innovation, voice capture and control, and challenging the status quo in the marketplace.
What is your role at ArkX Labs?
My primary focus is to help our customers build great voice-enabled products by understanding and effectively applying our EveryWord™ ultra far-field voice solutions. It’s very satisfying for me to work closely with our customers, to understand their needs, and to help them fully utilize our voice solutions. I also assist our team in providing pre-sales technical support, training, and sharing of best practices for building voice-enabled products.
What excited potential clients about EveryWord™ at CES?
The defining difference between our solutions versus other competitors’ solutions boils down to far superior performance. ArkX uses a fundamentally different technology that delivers accurate human-to-machine and human-to-human speech recognition at 3X the distance of standard far-field alternatives—in many applications that are 30 feet away or farther. It works around corners and performs perfectly in noisy and reverberative environments. Its unique ability to identify and suppress speech from TV or other competing single-point noise sources makes it unmatched in the voice capture and voice recognition marketplace.
When clients demo our solutions using our development kit, they are all amazed at the difference between our performance and all existing alternatives.
What are the latest developments at ArkX Labs?
There is a huge demand for our next-generation Integrated Voice Module with a microcontroller on board.
We continue to add new critical technology to our EveryWord™ Voice Control—most recently by integrating Sensory solutions. We now additionally support advanced voice features, including custom wake-word, commands, and natural language understanding. Our goal in everything we do is to make it easy for our customers to create voice experiences that are truly tailored to their unique applications and that support their own brand identities.
From a customer support point of view, we provide support and a distribution network across the globe. The latest example of our growing support capabilities is the addition of EDOM Technology as a global distribution partner serving our customers in China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.
What type of verticals or companies are showing the most interest?
When I started with the company in 2020, a lot of our engagements were consumer-focused applications such as smart speakers, smart home IoT, and conferencing speakers. Our customer space has expanded significantly since that time including MedTech, Healthcare, Industrial, Telecommunications, Retail Kiosk, and Education. The applications of voice interface and voice control continue to expand at a rapid pace, and we are very excited that our excellent far-field voice solution is a key building block for the success of these applications.
What caught your attention at the CES show and what are the implications for ArkX Labs?
At this year’s CES, AI technology was embodied in many consumer applications. Beyond CES, AI is being integrated into a wide range of products, including smart home devices, consumer robotics, health and fitness, home security, etc. Voice interface is a very natural way for users to interact with these AI-powered products. Many of these products already have well-integrated voice capabilities, and I expect the integration of voice to grow significantly in the coming years. This is very exciting for ArkX Labs as our technology and expertise can greatly improve the ability of AI-powered products to capture clear voice and eliminate unwanted background noise, guaranteeing a great user experience.
What was the reaction to EveryWord at CES?
It’s interesting and very rewarding. We heard over and over again after prospective customers viewed our in-person demo, the same kinds of comments. Many times, we heard comments such as:
· “Wow! That’s impressive!”
· “Better than anything I’ve ever experienced.”
· “Ark X is already doing what others are trying to figure out.”
· “The ArkX technology hears better than I can!”
