STMicroelectronics’ X-CUBE-AVS software package enables Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to run on STM32 microcontrollers (MCUs). This will allow simple connected objects such as smart appliances, home-automation devices, and office products to support advanced conversational user interfaces with cloud-based intelligence, i.e., automatic speech recognition and natural-language understanding.
The software contains ready-to-use libraries and open routines that accelerate porting the AVS Software Development Kit (SDK) to the MCU. Application samples are also included. The application is deemed to be the first such package to cater specifically for MCUs, whereas AVS development usually targets more power-hungry and expensive microprocessors.
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.
The X-CUBE-AVS comes with a demonstration example for the STM32F769 Discovery Kit (32F769IDISCOVERY), which shows how to connect a simple smart-speaker to AVS, leveraging the board-configuration interface included in the software. X-CUBE-AVS can be used with other STM32F7 microcontrollers, or any STM32 device with adequate CPU performance and memory to run the AVS SDK. Ready to get to work? Then download X-CUBE-AVS free of charge. If you still need more info, checkout the X-CUBE-AVS datasheet.