Vuzix Widens Enterprise Smart Glasses Voice Commands to 30 Languages
Smart glasses maker Vuzix has augmented its enterprise line of eyewear to understand commands in 30 languages. Vuzix partnered with French speech recognition tech developer Vivoka to add Vivoka’s Voice Development Kit to the M400 and M4000 smart glasses to teach the built-in voice AI the new languages and improve its response to different voices and environments.
Vuzix Linguistics
Vuzix added Vivoka’s tech to its smart glasses as part of its newest software upgrade. The AI built into the glasses has understood and responded to commands in half a dozen languages before now, but the inclusion of the Voice Development Kit multiplied the list. The new languages include dialects like Cantonese and make the AI better at parsing different accents. The upgrade also improves the AI’s ability to detect and understand what the wearer is saying when there’s a lot of ambient noise. Users can access the language list from the augmented reality images projected on the glasses. The speech improvements were released with other updates, including the option to publish video recorded by the 4K video camera in the glasses directly to YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Live.
“The broad language support capability of our products is a distinct competitive advantage for us across many foreign markets and we are happy to be working with a speech technology leader such as Vivoka to enable this,” Vuzix CEO Paul Travers said in a statement. “Moreover, many areas equipped with Vuzix Smart Glasses are affected by specific environments that make it difficult to have perfect connectivity for Cloud solutions and Vivoka’s solutions can run offline, on-device, to operate anywhere, anytime. We continue to bring additional functionalities and feature enhancements to our Smart Glasses, many based on the ongoing customer feedback we receive, as we leverage the power and performance of our robust hardware platform.”
Clear Lenses
After Google Glass failed as a consumer product, it found new life in enterprise work. For the consumer side of things, Google seems to be planning to build on what it acquired from North, the makers of Focals by North smart glasses, last year. North’s portfolio included many patents acquired from Intel in 2018 for the canceled Vaunt smart glasses, which the company integrated into its own product. Xiaomi’s feature-packed smart glasses are also pursuing the consumer market. Audio-only smart glasses are popping up far more frequently in the consumer space. That’s how many consumer-focused developers have decided to go. Anker’s new Soundcore smart glasses, Huawei’s Eyewear II, the Amazon Echo Frames, and the Ray-Ban Stories built with Facebook all forego visuals for audio. Vuzix has both consumer and enterprise tracks for its products, and expanding language options will only help it get into more factories and manufacturing plants.
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