By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk
STMicroelectronics has developed a software package that 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 conversational user interfaces.
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.
X-CUBE-AVS comes with a demonstration example for the STM32F769 Discovery Kit (order code: 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.
X-CUBE-AVS is available now to download, free of charge, from http://www.st.com/x-cube-avs
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