Voice Services are gaining a lot of worldwide attention at this time. About 55% of all US households will have Voice Assistant devices installed by 2022. Either on speakers, digital receivers, connected TVs, cars or wearables. Total installed devices will exceed 175 million at that time. While today most devices that integrate voice assistants are speakers, there is a clear trend that this technology will be integrated in more and more other devices in the future (Juniper Research 2018).

DiscVision has taken a leading role on this trend by integrating the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) into various devices. The integration of the Amazon AVS service in combination with a push-to-talk or hands-free voice input allows using customized devices via voice and at the same time execute all of the Amazon Alexa services such as Amazon Music, Kindle eBooks, TuneIn music as well as all of the 50.000 Alexa skills that are available today.

DiscVision is now an officially appointed Alexa Voice Service (AVS) Solution Provider and has developed various solutions qualified by Amazon. DiscVision provides solutions for visual devices such as TV sets, set-top boxes and media players, among other related devices. DiscVision voice control solution, AVS SDK, will allow device makers to build Alexa into products ranging from TVs to smart speakers and more, streamlining the process for building voice control into a variety of devices.

The AVS SDK comes as a complete package of a pre-compiled AVS library for the target platform as well as with an easy to integrate client system for various platforms such as Linux OS, Android OS and Web Interfaces. This pre-certified AVS SDK considerably shortens the time and costs for integrating Alexa into devices.

DiscVision will be presented at the International Broadcast Conference (IBC), taking place in Amsterdam Netherlands from September 14th to 18th 2018. You will find DiscVision at booth C51 in Hall 2. Here a number of integrations of AVS and skills are presented that have been done for network operators and retail partners.

One of the new devices presented there is a white label combo tuner integrating DVB-S2 / DVB-C and DVB-T network reception as well as Alexa Voice Service support using Push-to-Talk or hands-free support. The device can be customized in many ways and is an optimal entry point for a voice controlled state-of-the art STB platform.