Open source AI voice interface mounts on dashboards The Next Thing’s “Dashbot” is an automotive gizmo that offers voice control of a phone’s music, nav, and texts. Inside is a CHIP Pro module running Linux. A little over a month after announcing a computer-on-module version of the CHIP (Computer Hardware in Products) SBC called the CHIP Pro, The Next Thing went to Kickstarter to launch a hands-free automotive/mobile interface called the Dashbot, based on the COM. At publication time, the open source device was more than halfway to its $100K goal, with the funding round open until Dec. 17. Don’t expect to see your Dashbot under the Christmas tree, however. The $49 device won’t ship until July 2017. The Bluetooth-enabled Dashbot provides an AI voice agent interface, letting you interact with your Android Lollipop 5.0+ or iOS 10 smartphone service via voice. By prefacing any statements with “Dashbot,” you can order up music stations on Spotify, NPR One, FM Radio, Podcasts, Google Play Music, Apple Music, and other services. The system also plugs into Google Maps to provide a voice interface into the system, and it generates text-to-speech turn-by-turn directions. The Dashbot can be set up to tell you who is making a voice call, read incoming texts. or convert speech to text for SMS dictation. While much of this technology is already available on smartphones via AI voice agents like Apple’s Siri and Android’s Google Now, the Dashbot provides a 32-bit DSP with a far-field beamforming microphone array. The high fidelity MEMS array features adaptive background noise suppression, which helps pick up your voice commands even with the music on, says The Next Thing. See http://ift.tt/2gqEh5X
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