It was a day when speakers were being used only for music systems. But as engineering enhanced its wings, most things got changed. In those things, speakers are one of them. Nowadays speakers are not only being used for music systems but also become an important IoT element. For example Amazon-Alexa, Google Home series, and much more. Today we are going to discuss this unique gadget that took place in our daily life cycle. It is intelligent and smart.

What is a Smart Speaker?

The smart speaker is a voice-activated device and it has a virtual assistant that helps you to control wireless devices and perform various functions on your voice command. In the past few years, we have seen the evolution of smart speakers. In the beginning, they are not much intelligent but the continuous effort of our engineers and software designers made them extraordinary.

Now, this device can control almost every smart gadget of your home, from your smart TV to smart Air-conditioners. Even it can change your geyser temperature if your geyser has wireless connectivity or you can command it to make your coffee using smart coffee maker. Whenever we are thinking about smart speakers the first thing that comes to our mind is that what is the engineering behind this gadget? How does it do these operations? What are the internal circuit units that perform these operations? And many more questions are there. Anyway, we are here to answer your questions.

Engineering Inside:

This gadget has some important hardware units. Some of them are given below:

1. Speaker and microphones
2. Control board
3. Wireless connectivity module

Speakers And Microphones:

These are basic requirements for your voice assistant. Where a microphone is being used to listen to the voice commands of the user and also provide some feedback by using speakers. If you ask for news, music, and also for other subjects then remotely present neural networks decide as per requirement. On your voice command, you can change your smart TV channels, set the temperature of smart AC, Change the colors of smart lights and do much more.

Control Board:

It is the motherboard of your intelligent voice assistant. This unit has its memory, RAM, ROM, microprocessors, and all the required components that provide support to a full-fledged operating system. Yes! Your smart assistant has its OS (operating system). In most smart speakers Android is being very popular as the operating system. If you are planning to design your smart speaker then Raspberry-Pi is a very good option for that.

Wireless Connectivity Module:

Here is another important unit. Wireless connectivity module is the backbone of IoT (Internet of Things) market. This module provides connectivity between your smart assistant and the outer world, which is either the internet or several home appliances like smart fridge, smart washing machine, etc. It uses several communication protocols, for example, Bluetooth, Zig-Bee, WiFi.

Software on The Cloud:

As we know if your machine is having some intelligence then the software is present there for the same. The hardware units interact with the software. That’s how the smart and intelligent features have developed at an accelerated pace. It is interesting to know that brain of your smart speaker is present far away from it, on the cloud servers. The software for your gadget is specifically designed to learn intelligence and serve several functions to the user. It is a little complicated than we think. Software modules use several neural networks to perform the desired action with high accuracy and in a time-efficient manner. If you are using several smart speakers then you will find that every model is having its limitations to perform any task. Here software plays its role to build an efficient model.

Working Process:

Smart speakers are primarily working on your voice command. When a user says something to this gadget then the operating system of this gadget performs some processing and sends it to cloud-based software. Here multiple neural networks perform operations as per voice command and revert it to the gadget. After that gadget either uses speakers or wireless modules to fulfill the output. For example, when say to play music then smart speaker receives your voice, translates it into their understandable form, processes it, sends it to cloud-based software, and finally plays the desired music. This process contains multiple steps but all of them execute within few seconds. How cool it is!

Applications:

The smart speakers enable us to do a variety of different things from controlling wireless enable home appliances. For example, by using smart speaker you can cook your food by smart slow cooker or you can change your smart geyser temperature. In addition you can lock and unlock your doors by using smart lock with this gadget. It also takeaways online as well as providing information like the news, weather forecast, and much more like a Smart mirror. And they can also stream your favorite music, can change your home temperature by using home thermostat, and many things. That’s what your virtual assistant works.

Thanks for reading. See you soon with another exploration!