Congratulations to Bose team on the new Bose Smart Soundbar 300. Recently promoted on amazon.com landing page, it truly looks and sounds great!
This smart soundbar, delivers a complete entertainment-control experience with built-in intuitive voice control that “expands your Alexa capabilities, allowing you to control this smart soundbar, your TV, and your cable/satellite box with one voice command“.
Check it out here.
Since the beginning of this phase in our journey, we’ve outlined our vision for the smart home: protecting consumer choice and brand loyalties without sacrificing the promise of an ecosystem of cooperative services in the home. We are happy to take the next step in our commitment to Voice Interoperability Initiative (VII) and joining leading brands in this adventure; while ensuring customers have choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice assistants when it comes to voice enabled products.
We are happy to take the next step in our commitment to Voice Interoperability Initiative and joining leading brands in this adventure while ensuring customers have choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice assistants.
We believe users prefer to maintain a direct relationship with their trusted brands, without an intermediary. This quantifiable belief lead us to develop a collection of white label hardware and software solutions including a smart home hub with built-in voice assistant, Nevo Butler. These solutions enable brands to deliver unique and innovative branded-services directly to their audience, while supporting multiple voice assistants running on the same platform. A fair and vibrant smart home can only be realized through collaboration, and if conversational interfaces are going to play a major role in delivering services into the home (and we think they will!), it should be obvious that: “Voice services should work seamlessly alongside one another on a single device.” (quote from VII).
Learn more about this initiative here.
Microsoft Build – a premier developer conference that takes place at Seattle every year, was held online this May 19 – 21 , 2020. As thousands of developers from across the globe come together to learn, connect and code, this event focuses on empowering them with big ideas! We are happy to share that Universal Electronics Inc., is featured at Microsoft Build 2020, showcasing a customer story about how we built an interoperability focused intuitive platform for IoT device management with nevo.ai, voice-enabled digital assistant on Microsoft Azure as a solid and scalable foundation.
We have worked hard on building an end-to-end service that would help brands deliver voice-enabled navigation and control capabilities that work across everyday devices found in the home—offering a truly unique consumer experience.
“We enable brands to build out capabilities that go beyond their own ecosystems,” says Arsham Hatambeiki, our SVP for Product and Technology . “Our QuickSet software is present in more than half a billion devices, helping our customers connect their brand to devices, services, and users in the home.”
Our QuickSet 5.0, uses Azure IoT capabilities to provide a single platform for managing devices from different providers, blending entertainment and smart home experiences; while Nevo® Butler adds a built-in voice-enabled assistant, nevo.ai, built on Microsoft Azure’s open framework for conversational AI to ensure that our consumers have smooth, realistic interactions with our nevo.ai virtual assistant.
“The beauty of working with Cognitive Services and other Azure resources is how easy it is for us to do a quick proof of concept,” says Nikki Ahmadi, our Director of Product for Cloud and Software.
Thanks to the combination of user-friendly tools in Azure and the strong existing product knowledge within our team, we can continue to quickly design and build valuable, future-looking services without having to add to its head count significantly. “We were able to vastly expand the scope of our services—with the same size team,” says Hatambeiki. “Through Microsoft, we give our developers and engineers much stronger, more capable tools to build something that would usually require adding a team of 50 or even 100 people.” Read the full customer story published by Microsoft.
Curious to read more about nevo then and now and our partnership with Microsoft? Check out this blast from the past and go down the memory lane: Microsoft Announces Consumer Products Giants BenQ, HP and Samsung Support Smart Displays
