CEVA Partners with Fluent.ai to Offer Multilingual Speech Understanding Solutions for Intelligent Edge Devices

Fluent.ai’s suite of technologies for neural network-based speech-to-intent applications optimized for CEVA’s latest generation of low power audio and sensor hub DSPs targeting wearables, consumer devices and IoT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., – September 16, 2020 – CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA), the leading licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies, and Fluent.ai, a leading provider of on-device, small footprint and multilingual speech understanding solutions, announced today that the companies have partnered to offer ultra-low power speech-to-intent solutions for intelligent edge devices. Fluent.ai’s suite of speech-to-intent technologies has been ported and optimized for CEVA’s low power audio and sensor hub DSPs, providing a high performance, robust solution for OEMs and ODMs looking to integrate intelligent voice activation and control into their wearables, consumer devices and IoT products.

Fluent.ai provides embedded, noise robust and multilingual speech understanding solutions capable of running fully offline on small footprint and low power devices. Fluent.ai technology is private-by-design and can support any language and accent, enabling users to speak to their devices in their native language, naturally, and without sacrificing their privacy. CEVA’s powerful audio and sensor hub DSPs, including the CEVA-X2, CEVA-BX1, CEVA-BX2 and SensPro™ family, enable the full suite of speech-to-intent technologies to run seamlessly in always-on mode. These DSPs can also run other software and algorithms that further enhance the performance and feature set, including ClearVox front-end noise reduction, MotionEngine for sensor fusion and the SenslinQ framework for contextual awareness.

“CEVA’s leadership position in licensable low power DSPs and software for voice-enabled embedded devices makes them an ideal partner to further proliferate our speech-to-intent software in the market,” said Vikrant Tomar, Founder and CTO, Fluent.ai. “Voice activation and control is emerging as one of the most sought-after technologies in an increasingly contactless world, and together we’re bringing a cost-effective and highly accurate edge AI solution that can understand intent from speech, even in the noisiest environments.”

“Fluent.ai’s speech-to-intent technology with multilanguage support running on our DSPs is ideal for power-constrained intelligent devices where voice is the primary user interface,” said Moshe Sheier, Vice President of Marketing at CEVA. “Having all the speech processing take place on the edge device ensures privacy of the data, low latency and instantaneous response. Together, we are lowering the entry barriers for adding high quality, naturally spoken voice control to any device.”

Fluent.ai utilizes a unique approach to multi-language speech understanding: instead of the traditional Cloud-based approach of transcribing speech to text and then using natural language processing to extract meaning, the company has developed an end-to-end spoken language understanding technology that directly extracts intent from the input speech alone. This approach allows Fluent.ai to design speech understanding models that are much smaller in size, yet provide high accuracy even in noisy environments. Fluent.ai systems are capable of recognizing up to 1000s of intents in a small model size of 100s of KBs. Furthermore, Fluent.ai's ability to build multiple languages into a single model means that users can switch seamlessly between languages when interacting with their device, without the need to configure language settings in between. These advantages make Fluent.ai an ideal speech recognition solution for smart devices in the home and office, consumer wearables and factory robot automation.

CEVA's scalable audio and sensor hub DSPs are optimized for sound processing applications ranging from always-on voice control up to multiple sensors fusion. They have been specifically designed to tackle multi-microphone speech processing use-cases, high quality audio playback and post-processing, and on-device sound neural network implementations. In addition, a large 3rd party ecosystem of audio/voice software, hardware and development tools companies have optimized their solutions for CEVA DSPs, for a wide array of use cases and applications. For more information on CEVA's audio and voice product offerings, visit https://www.ceva-dsp.com/app/audio-voice-and-speech/.

About Fluent.ai

Fluent.ai Inc. is a privately held Canadian company founded in 2015 and based in Montreal. Fluent.ai’s mission is to voice enable the world’s devices. Through over seven years of research, the company has developed a range of artificial intelligence voice interface software solutions for OEMs and service providers. Fluent.ai solutions deliver unprecedented accuracy along with a highly customizable user experience with the goal of finally breaking the barriers to worldwide adoption of voice user interfaces. To learn more about Fluent.ai, visit https://www.fluent.ai/ or email contact@fluent.ai.

About CEVA, Inc.

CEVA is the leading licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies. We offer Digital Signal Processors, AI processors, wireless platforms and complementary software for sensor fusion, image enhancement, computer vision, voice input and artificial intelligence, all of which are key enabling technologies for a smarter, connected world. We partner with semiconductor companies and OEMs worldwide to create power-efficient, intelligent and connected devices for a range of end markets, including mobile, consumer, automotive, robotics, industrial and IoT. Our ultra-low-power IPs include comprehensive DSP-based platforms for 5G baseband processing in mobile and infrastructure, advanced imaging and computer vision for any camera-enabled device and audio/voice/speech and ultra-low power always-on/sensing applications for multiple IoT markets. For sensor fusion, our Hillcrest Labs sensor processing technologies provide a broad range of sensor fusion software and IMU solutions for AR/VR, robotics, remote controls, and IoT. For artificial intelligence, we offer a family of AI processors capable of handling the complete gamut of neural network workloads, on-device. For wireless IoT, we offer the industry’s most widely adopted IPs for Bluetooth (low energy and dual mode), Wi-Fi 4/5/6 (802.11n/ac/ax) and NB-IoT. Visit us at www.ceva-dsp.com