Intel is the latest to jump on the Amazon Alexa bandwagon

As Amazon continues to make the early running in the voice UI era with Alexa, Intel has created a special developer kit for it.

The Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit is designed to enable developers to create consumer products featuring Alexa Voice Service. The reason a chip giant like Intel wants to be involved, other than merely jumping on the bandwagon, is that for voice UI to work well it not only needs decent processing but also a bunch of other sensors and distributed microphones.

“Natural language means machines need to clearly recognize and respond to user commands from a reasonable conversation distance,” said Miles Kingston, GM of Intel’s Smart Home Group, in a blog. “People speak and hear in 360 degrees, not just in a direct line of sight. Devices need array microphones and complex noise mitigation technology.

“A quality voice interaction means devices identify the speaker’s location, mitigate and suppress ambient noise, and understand spoken commands on the mics, even while playing music (talking and listening at the same time), as well as waking up when it hears the wake word (e.g. “Alexa”).”

Amazon seems to be doing a good job of partnering with other parts of the tech sector to boost its diversification efforts. Alexa is attracting both device and component makers, as well as retail partners, while AWS is showing a growing inclination to get into bed with strategic partners. In short Amazon is arguably the fastest growing of the internet giants right now.