STM32 Software Package Brings Amazon Alexa Technology to Simple Connected Objects
Article By : STMicroelectronics
New software package enables simple connected devices to run Alexa Voice Services
Geneva, April 6, 2018 — The X-CUBE-AVS software package from STMicroelectronics enables Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to run on STM32* microcontrollers, allowing simple connected objects such as smart appliances, home-automation devices, and office products to support advanced conversational user interfaces with Cloud-based intelligence like automatic speech recognition and natural-language understanding.
As an expansion package for the STM32Cube software platform, X-CUBE-AVS contains ready-to-use libraries and open routines that accelerate porting the AVS SDK (Software Development Kit) to the microcontroller. With application samples also included, it abstracts developers from the complex software layers needed to host AVS on an embedded device. Being the first such package to cater specifically for microcontrollers, whereas AVS development usually targets more power-hungry and expensive microprocessors, X-CUBE-AVS makes Alexa technology accessible to a wider spectrum of developers and projects.
The software handles low-layer communication and connection to AVS servers, provides application-specific services, and encapsulates the AVS protocol to ease application implementation. Connection management includes a persistent-token mechanism for directly restoring connection losses without repeated user authentication. A software test harness is provided for endurance testing, which can simulate events such as network disconnection to facilitate robustness testing and validation of the user application.