Picovoice SDK Introduction

Picovoice is the end-to-end platform for building voice products on your terms. Unlike Alexa and Google services, Picovoice runs entirely on-device while being more accurate. Using Picovoice, one can infer a user’s intent from a naturally spoken utterance such as:

Hey Edison, set the lights in the living room to blue.

Picovoice detects the occurrence of the custom wake word (Hey Edison), and then extracts the intent from the follow-on spoken command:

{
  "intent": "changeLightColor",
  "slots": {
    "location": "living room",
    "color": "blue"
  }
}

Why Picovoice

• Private & Secure: Everything is processed offline. Intrinsically private; HIPAA and GDPR compliant.
• Accurate: Resilient to noise and reverberation. Outperforms cloud-based alternatives by wide margins.
• Cross-Platform: Design once, deploy anywhere. Build using familiar languages and frameworks.
• Self-Service: Design, train, and test voice interfaces instantly in your browser, using Picovoice Console.
• Reliable: Runs locally without needing continuous connectivity.
• Zero Latency: Edge-first architecture eliminates unpredictable network delay.

Platform Features

Custom Wake Words

Picovoice makes use of the Porcupine wake word engine to detect utterances of given wake phrases. You can train custom wake words using Picovoice Console and then run the exported wake word model on the Picovoice SDK.

Intent Inference

Picovoice relies on the Rhino Speech-to-Intent engine to directly infer user's intent from spoken commands within a given domain of interest (a "context"). You can design and train custom contexts for your product using Picovoice Console. The exported Rhino models then can run with the Picovoice SDK on any supported platform.