Sensory powers new voice-enabled Farberware microwaves, the first of many home devices to feature a custom, private voice UI

Sensory today announced that custom voice assistants that deliver total user privacy are officially here and are already revolutionizing how people interact with things they own.

Sensory’s technologies are helping custom voice assistants go mainstream, powering everyday appliances like the Farberware FM11VABK voice-controlled microwave oven. Immediately available in the US market, this new microwave oven utilizes Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree and TrulyNatural  technologies to provide all the benefits of a custom voice assistant without the privacy compromises of cloud-based, general-purpose assistant platforms.

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A recent survey by Voicebot.ai called out custom voice assistants as the biggest voice AI trend for 2021. Conceptually, custom voice assistants are voice assistants trained for specific domains, making them capable of outperforming general-purpose assistants like Google, Alexa, and Siri in quality of experience.

Amazon has already jumped on this trend with its announcement of custom voice assistants. Sensory has led the market in this same direction, but with a few substantial differences – Sensory does it 100% on device, keeping voice data completely private, with no data collection from the product and no recordings sent to the cloud. This means no added costs for cloud connections.

Due to the edge architecture of Sensory’s domain-specific assistant technology, customers can enjoy hassle-free setup – no Wi-Fi, no apps, no third-party hardware, and no cloud-connected assistant always listening in. Just plug the microwave into a power outlet and it is ready to understand numerous voice commands, such as, “Open door,” “cook popcorn,” “set timer to one minute 36 seconds,” “defrost,” “reheat for 2 minutes,” and many more commands. Ease of setup and use is just one of the many benefits of Sensory’s AI on the edge. Since Sensory’s speech recognition is all done on-device, concerns about audio recordings being sent and stored in the cloud are put to rest — privacy comes standard!

“We’re at a turning point with voice UI technology. People love the convenience of mainstream voice assistants, but privacy, accuracy, complicated setup, and connectivity issues continue to be a growing concern among users. These concerns have intensified the need for custom private voice assistants,” said Todd Mozer, CEO at Sensory. “Sensory’s customer base used to be driven by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung that licensed Sensory technology to improve their general assistant offerings. Today we’re seeing a major shift, with most of our customers being brands that want to own and manage their own private custom voice assistant platforms.”

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The Farberware microwave is an example of what can be done at the edge. The large-vocabulary recognizer with a custom statistical language model and NLU can support complex actions like, “Cook four baked potatoes.” Because the Sensory NLU engine looks for “intents” within a limited domain, the chance of being misunderstood is substantially less than any off-the-shelf assistants. Sensory’s product testing division, Vocalize.ai evaluated the device for speech recognition accuracy and task completion rate, and when benchmarked against the Amazon Basics Microwave with Alexa, the Farberware microwave accurately recognized and executed 68% more spoken commands than Alexa. The complete evaluation report is available from Sensory.

“Smart appliance adoption is growing among US broadband households. Thirteen percent of US broadband households now own a smart appliance and smart microwaves are a leading category. Voice control is a highly-valued feature for smart appliance owners, with more than one-fifth of those who own or intend to purchase various smart appliances rating voice control as one of the most appealing features of the appliance,” said Patrice Samuels, senior analyst, Parks Associates.

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