Intel Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. said Thursday they’re teaming up to deliver a new development kit that allows developers to embed Amazon’s Alexa voice-control capabilities in third-party smart home devices.

The Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit provides an audio front-end solution for far-field voice control and is claimed to be the first audio front-end solution that combines far-field voice processing and the “Alexa” wake word detection on a single chip.

On the tech side, the chip is based on a new digital signal processor architecture from Intel with an inference engine that optimizes the process of adding far-field voice recognition to connected products. In addition, the “high-performance” algorithms are said to be designed to allow for acoustic echo cancellation and noise reduction to enable speech capture in noisy environments. For those who are looking to build prototypes, the chip is compatible with Raspberry Pi 3 miniature computer running AVS audio client software.

“Natural language means machines need to clearly recognize and respond to user commands from a reasonable conversation distance,” Intel Product Marketing Manager Miles Kingston explained in a statement. “People speak and hear in 360 degrees, not just in a direct line of sight. A quality voice interaction means devices identify the speaker’s location, mitigate and suppress ambient noise, and understand spoken commands on the mics, even while playing music … as well as waking up when it hears the wake word.”

Amazon announced its “Alexa everywhere” strategy in January, saying it wanted to see its voice-assistant technology in all sorts of devices, including washing machines, DVRs and television sets. Intel’s development kit could make it much easier for manufacturers and innovators to build the technology into their devices.

Image: Intel