Bluetooth LE portable voice recording device accurately converts speech to text

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that Sogou, a Beijing, China-based technology company, has selected Nordic’s nRF52810 Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) to provide the wireless connectivity for its ‘Smart Recorder C1’.

The Sogou Smart Recorder C1 solution incorporates a portable Bluetooth LE voice recording device and partner smartphone app to support the wireless high definition recording, transcription, and simultaneous translation of live conversations for applications including interviews, note-taking, meetings, and training. The device is equipped with a digital high-sensitivity microphone, and uses Sogou’s proprietary ‘SmartVoice’ digital noise reduction algorithm for high-fidelity restoration of the human voice. According to test reports from Sogou’s ‘Voice Lab’, the device is able to achieve speech-to-text recognition up to 95 percent accuracy.

The Nordic nRF52810 SoC provides the Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity between the Sogou Smart Recorder and the user’s Bluetooth 4.0 (and later) smartphone or Bluetooth LE-equipped device, enabling the recorded speech data to be transferred with low latency to the smartphone and continuously converted to text by the ‘Sogou Recorder’ app. At the same time, the files can be translated from Chinese to English or vice versa using Sogou’s app-based translation software. From the app, the voice recordings and speech-to-text files are sent to the Cloud where they can be retrieved and managed without the need for transcription.

 

The Sogou Smart Recorder’s rechargeable battery provides up to 20 days of standby time and up to 16 hours of use in continuous recording mode, thanks in part to the ultra low power characteristics of the Nordic SoC. The nRF52810 has been engineered to minimize power consumption with features such as the 2.4GHz radio’s 4.6mA peak RX/TX currents and a fully-automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80 percent compared with Nordic’s nRF51 Series SoCs. 

 

In addition, Sogou selected the nRF52810 SoC for its Smart Recorder C1 because the chip provides Bluetooth 5 support including 2x on-air raw data bandwidth (2Mbps); 8x broadcasting ability with advertising extensions that increase the advertising packet payload size to 251 bytes, and an improved channel coexistence algorithm.

 

Nordic’s nRF52810 multiprotocol SoC combines an 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with the 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF protocol software) featuring reduced radio energy consumption, with 192kB Flash memory and 24kB RAM. The nRF52810 SoC is supplied with the latest version of Nordic’s S112 SoftDevice, Bluetooth 5-compliant RF protocol software.