Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. The technology can listen continuously and alert the application when a certain word or phrase were detected.This is sometimes called “word trigger mode”.

Yes. We can identify the user’s voice, or recognize a certain password he trained the application for. This is called “Speaker Dependent Recognition (SDR)”.

Yes. An application can have both SDR and SIR modes, but not simultaneously.

“Barge-in” refers to the ability of the speech recognition technology to recognize users as they talk on top of product’s speech output. In other words, when users can start talking while the application is talking to them. Barge-in is usually resource intensive and is not realistic to implement in small embedded platforms. However, in Rubidium we developed a patent-pending barge-in algorithm that can run in very small footprint and still perform well.

No, our policy is to develop the application together with our customers. Our experience shows that customers which are improficient in speech recognition try to develop an application, the result is often unsatisfactory. We rather suggest a milestone-oriented plan, and deliver to the customer engineering samples at each milestone.

There is no standard how to measure speech recognition accuracy. The accuracy depends on so many factors that a uniform test cannot be repeated exactly. Moreover, recognition accuracy alone cannot be considered without taking into account the resources needed by the engine to achieve this accuracy score.
However, in most field testing of our applications we achieve over 98% recognition accuracy.

We can handle any microphone. Our recognition algorithm has a special algorithm to cancel the effect of different microphones. This can be a simple electret condenser microphone capsule, or an analog MEMS or digital MEMS microphone. We can use either omni-directional, cardioid or other types of mics. Furthermore, Rubidium developed a beam-forming algorithm that can handle more than more microphone.

There is no limitation on talking speed, provided that the user is not trying to trick the system, and the user is speaking naturally.

Yes, it is possible and Rubidium has already implemented this feature in products. The language can be changed by a physical switch or by voice (stating the name of the language desired). We can even support several languages concurrently!

Yes. We would charge NRE for the development and tooling and then usually refund it during mass production.

Yes. We can make a product recognize young voices of children over the age of 5, if the child speaks clearly. However, for optimum results, the product must be pre-trained to recognize voices in this age group.

We offer several chip configurations, depending on the application’s complexity, namely number of words, voice output duration, number of languages, interface requirements, etc.

Our typical solution includes a single chip, functioning as a System-on-Chip (SOC), with all peripherals on board, including analog input and output, microphone pre-amp, RAM and ROM.

Yes, it is possible. Change of an external memory cartridge does not need any installation, just “plug and play”.

Yes, however we refer to this list as Confidential Information. The list of available vocabulary is therefore supplied to customers after setting up an NDA to protect our IP. Of course, many times we record the words for an application to satisfy the customer’s specific vocabulary.

Without a product specification, it is very difficult to estimate these costs with a reasonable accuracy level. However, development for a full project is generally in the range of thousands of US$. For high volume applications we would consider refunding the development costs by applying a certain discount on the first orders.

Yes. Furthermore, we can recognize a phrase that contains words of interest mixed with extraneous speech. Our technology isolates the vocabulary words and/or phrases and ignores the rest.

Rubidium gladly allows you to use the voices of your choice at no additional cost. After you provide us with the recordings, we simply process it and add it to our application.

Yes. The language of the product can be determined by factory setup or by the end user. It just depends on the specification.

Yes, this is possible.

Most of our configurations support 10 bits audio input and output. Some configurations support 16 bit input and output.

The total vocabulary size is only limited by memory size. The ACTIVE vocabulary size (the maximal number of words/phrases that can be recognized at a certain dialogue state) is limited to 12-50, depending on the platform.

Yes. Furthermore, the speech recognition chip can also perform the function of the remote control chip, so that there is no need to have both chips. Our chip can recognize speech, talk back to the user, control the remote control keypad and perform the infra-red remote operation.

We offer several speech compression algorthms, consuming from 4800bps to 64Kbps. This means that 1 minute of talk-back to the user consumes 36Kbytes to 480Kbyte.
A typical application would have up to a few minutes of total speech output time.

It refers to the number of words recognized at the same time. The total number of recognized words can be different than the maximum active vocabulary, because the active vocabulary can change during the dialog.

Our speech recognition can run on many processors, including DSP and non-DSP (such as ARM Cortex, etc.). Minimum CPU size is 16 bit, fixed point but we run also on floating point CPUs.

Our technology can recognize spontaneous continuous speech, meaning the user can speak naturally, including several words in one phrase that may be connected.

Each word or phrase (depending on the dialogue structure) consumes around 2 – 2.5 KByte of ROM space.

It typically takes about 2 months to develop a prototype. Full development takes about the same time, depending on the integration period and change of specification from prototype to full product.