Sensory Brings Natural Language Understanding to the Edge with TrulyNatural

Sensory, a Silicon Valley company focused on new capabilities for machine learning and embedded AI, announces the first full feature release of TrulyNatural, the company’s embedded large vocabulary speech recognition platform, with natural language understanding. TrulyNatural will help companies move beyond the cloud to create products capable of natural language interaction without compromising their customers’ privacy and without the high memory cost of open source-based solutions.

In March of 2019, PCMag.com published results from a consumer survey where 40% of the 2,000 U.S. consumers questioned placed privacy as their top concern related to smart home devices in their homes; far surpassing other concerns like cost, installation, product options and cross-platform interoperability. Furthermore, Bloomberg published an article last week titled, “Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa,” which explains that Amazon’s Alexa team does in fact pay people to listen to recordings for algorithm training purposes. 

TrulyNatural helps address such concerns, because it provides devices with an intelligent natural language user interface (UI), while keeping voice data private and secure; voice requests never leave the device, nor are they ever stored.

“To benefit from the advantages afforded by cloud-based natural language processing, companies have been forced to risk customer privacy by allowing always listening devices to share voice data with the recognition service providers,” says Todd Mozer, CEO at Sensory. “TrulyNatural does not require any data to leave the device and eliminates the privacy risks associated with sending voice data to the cloud, and as an added benefit it allows product manufacturers to own the customer relationship and experience.”

TrulyNatural can provide a natural language voice UI on devices of all shapes and sizes, and can be deployed for domain-specific applications, such as industrial and enterprise applications and more. Sensory develops its speech recognizer from scratch. TrulyNatural can be as small as under 10MB in a natural language and large vocabulary setting, but it can also be scaled to support broad-domain applications like virtual assistants and call center chatbots with a virtually unlimited vocabulary. By categorizing speech into unlimited intents and entities, the natural language understanding component of the system enables intelligent interpretation of any speech and does not require scripted grammars.

Designed to run completely on an applications processor, TrulyNatural does not require an internet connection, as all of the speech processing is done natively (at the edge), not in the cloud. It enables a safe, secure, consistent, eas-to-implement experience for the end-user, free of requiring any extra apps or Wi-Fi to be setup or operational. By combining TrulyNatural with other Sensory technologies, product manufacturers can further enhance the user experience offered by their products by using their own branded wake words. Furthermore, device manufacturers can bolster the security of their devices by pairing TrulyNatural with TrulySecure to restrict user access or features through voice biometrics.

TrulyHandsfree TrulyNatural currently supports US English, with UK English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish planned for release in 2019 and 2020. SDK’s are available for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and other platforms.

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Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.