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 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 solution acts automatically like an Amazon Echo and enables the possibility to use all of the integrated Alexa services such as Amazon Music, Kindle eBooks, TuneIn music as well as all of the 15.000 Alexa skills that are available today and whose numbers are constantly growing.

In addition to the AVS integration, DiscVision provides a white label STB control skill that allows controlling the STB, i.e. Zapping, EPG search, Scheduling of recordings, live TV control, trickmodes etc. using a simple voice interface. The STB control skill implements a real conversational UI to the STB that gives voice feedback to the user as well as graphical information on the TV screen.

DiscVision as a R&D design house for the STB industry for more than 15 years offers its integration services to STB vendors. Using an easy to use SDK it is very easy to integrate the white label STB control skill into any STB either running on Linux OS or any other RTOS platform.

For the integration of the Alexa Voice Service, DiscVision offers a second SDK that allows own integration of such services on all kinds of Linux platforms. In both cases - AVS integration and Skill integration - there is no access to the STB software necessary for DiscVision engineers. Especially for the AVS integration a pre-compiled library will be provided with the SDK that can be interfaced by the STB vendor himself and integrated into the STB platform.

Besides the voice-controlled devices, DiscVision also presents some novel STB solutions such as a new Android OSP DVB-X receiver that runs a novel and highly customizable launcher engine based on the Android TIF platform.

More information can be provided on request or at the ANGACOM show from June 12th to June 14th 2018 in Cologne (www.angacom.de) in hall 7, booth A60.