Intel Looking for Smart Home Role Through Voice, Connectivity, Edge Computing

“We’re trying to win their first-party products,” said Kingston of Echo products, and the company is also creating “building blocks” so third-party customers can integrate Alexa into any type of platform running Intel inside. “If you make your own product, and you’d really like to have voice but you don’t want to invest in creating your own voice solution -- and figuring out how to do the beam-forming -- we can bring an Alexa SDK [software developer kit], Intel processing, Intel mic arrays and make it easier for people to integrate,” he said. The Intel Atom x5-Z8350 processor and an Intel eight-mic array are in a Lenovo smart speaker introduced at CES and due to ship this year, he said.

Intel’s role as a bridge product helps Amazon get more Alexa devices in the market, said Kingston, and helps Intel “sell more silicon.” The company studied people’s behavior in more than 1,000 homes in North America, Western Europe and China to examine daily life and where consumers experience “friction,” he said. Out of the research, Intel decided technology could lessen the friction through “emulating the human senses,” Kingston said. The Echo Show addresses both voice through mics and vision, through the device’s built-in camera, he said.

Looking ahead, Intel is working on having Alexa listen for “anomalies,” not just a wake word, said Kingston. Those could be glass breaking, a baby crying or a dog barking. Anomalies on the vision side will have a sense of who’s in the home -- “are they running or walking?” -- he said, to give the home “more sensor data.” Intel also has an analytics role in assessing data, he said. Kingston referred to false triggers, such as blowing tree branches that set off motion sensors in webcams, notifying homeowners unnecessarily of movement outside the home. Intel’s goal is to use local analytics with gathered data to determine which video frames from a camera feed, for instance, are significant and warrant notification.

That type of intelligence at the home level is based on edge computing, where devices in the home pack higher brainpower rather than relying on the cloud. A router, appliance or Echo Show could be enabled to do local processing, Kingston said. Benefits are efficiency but also privacy, he said. For a camera feed, a parent might want to know that a teenager arrived home but not to have the video go to the cloud, he said. Intel is working on a “robust road map” of processors for various applications, he said.

Intel’s goal at CEDIA was to generate awareness about the company’s various roles in the smart home, said Kingston. The company intends to bring the same “skill set” it brought to the PC market to Alexa-based products and the smart home industry overall, which “needs it,” he said. He referred to “fragmentation” among “a lot of players” and said Intel can make it easier for products to work together.

Intel worked with original design manufacturers Compal and Pegatron on form factor reference designs for a smart speaker that was “80 percent manufacturable,” said Kingston. Intel did much of the “heavy lifting” and tuning on the engineering side so that companies wanting to “quickly bring their own product to market” could do so. The chipmaker is focusing on “acceleration of voice,” “vision use cases” and local edge computing, he said.

Voice is “foundational” to the smart home market and second only to connectivity, said Kingston. Ease of use has been a primary barrier to adoption of smart home technology, he said. “You had a dozen applications that managed a dozen purpose-built devices. It wasn’t any quicker to turn your lights on if you had to turn on your phone, go find the right app and press the button,” he said. “Alexa has made it so simple to just say, ‘Turn on lights, group them,’ etc.”

Kingston believes voice will open the smart home world to a broader consumer base beyond early adopters. People have become comfortable using voice with smartphones and cars, and many mainstream consumers who would have never bought a smart light bulb or a smart thermostat, if they had to control it manually, may be comfortable enough with voice control to venture into the space, he said.

But for voice to take off, advanced connectivity needs to be in place, said Kingston. Homes today have several computers, a phone, a tablet, smart TV, game console and now smart speakers -- all requiring an internet connection, he said. “Once you start getting into this stuff, you grow the number of connected devices quickly,” he said, “and your Wi-Fi will just break.” Intel’s advice for connected homes: “Invest in new Wi-Fi that’s meant for many, many devices.” That helps Intel, too, which makes chips for advanced routers such as the Asus Blue Cave.

CEDIA Notebook

Samsung turned heads at CEDIA with its Frame TV, mostly for the technical and artistic aspects rather than the TV specs or the nascent collection of 100 digital images available for display at launch. Stored images are divided into categories including wildlife and landscape, and users can supply their own photos, which should be shot in 16:9 aspect ratio for optimum results, Scott Cohen, Samsung senior product training manager, told us. Frame TV owners also can subscribe for $4.99 per month to Samsung’s Art Store for a wider selection of images from established and emerging artists’ works, or buy images a la carte at roughly $20 each. Users can select their own mattes for the images using the remote control, and they have a choice of color and matte placement style either in front of the image or in shadowbox mode where the picture appears to float on screen. Bezels are customizable, too, and magnetic frames, which can be pulled off easily, come in white, beige and walnut colors. The 4K TVs are available in 55-inch ($1,999) and 65-inch ($2,799) sizes with a 43-inch model on the way, Cohen said. A standout feature of the TV is the ability to make a collage of an image, dividing it into three individual pictures, for a tryptic effect, or other configurations. Art displays automatically when the power button for the TV goes off, said Cohen, and the TVs have motion sensors that turn off the displays altogether after a preset time. When the TVs sense motion again, the TVs power on to art mode, he said. A brightness sensor adjusts image brightness according to ambient light. The sound mirroring feature allows owners to use the TV’s speakers as a Bluetooth speaker for streaming music while art is displayed. A separate One Connect box houses the system's brains and is connected by one 15-meter cable, allowing the TVs to mount flush to a wall, he said. The LCD panel used for the TVs isn't in Samsung’s flagship Q series TVs, said Cohen, because art doesn’t display as well on a high-contrast display. The TVs aren’t prone to image retention, he said.

Sonos had CEDIA integrators scratching their heads during the trade expo. The company paid for booth space, only to refer attendees to the company’s offsite “Loft” about 10 minutes from the San Diego Convention Center. In social media posts, a couple of integrators saw the move as a snub, or worse, to integrators. Another saw it as a sign the company has “too much money.” Sonos told us before the show it had no news to share at CEDIA but was hoping dealers would meet Andrew Vloyanetes, Sonos’ lead for the custom installer channel.

It didn’t take CEDIA long to dissociate itself from the trade show that ended Saturday. Clicks on the CEDIA Expo tab on the trade association’s website Monday morning were directed to a “Sorry but the page you requested was not found” message. A click on the Expo tab on the CEDIA website returned: “If you are the owner of this website, please contact your hosting provider.” CEDIA, which sold its annual trade event earlier this year (see 1701260044) to Emerald Expositions, said it would assist Emerald in the 2017 transitional year. Emerald Expositions also runs the KBIS and National Stationery Show events.