Ai-Thinker: New Possibilities for Voice-Enabled Embedded Products

Ai-Thinker’s VC series module is an AI based offline voice recognition module. In the speech recognition technology, it has high reliable wake up recognition rate, longer distance wakes up, lower false wake up rate, stronger noise cancellation, faster recognition , and pure offline recognition without any kind of network connection. 

Ai-Thinker: New Possibilities for Voice-Enabled Embedded Products 1

Advantages of offline voice?

  • Fast response
  • Convenient and easy to use for many products
  • No internet connection required, ensure data privacy and security.
  • With Offline voice, product becomes smarter, adds USP.

Product Features

  • 32bit RISC core, built-in 2MB Flash, running frequency 240MHz;
  • Single MIC, support Chinese/English language.
  • Support offline identification of up to 150 local commands to meet the various needs of your product functions.
  • Support wake-up word self-learning without compiling firmware.
  • The measured wake-up distance is more than 5 meters, and supports AEC echo cancellation and steady-state noise reduction.
  • The recognition time is less than 100ms, and the comprehensive recognition rate can reach more than 98%.
  • Other interfaces like UART/I2C/PWM/SPI/GPIO available for the application.
  • Supports online custom voice support without code development.
  • Power Supply 3.6V~5V, and the current is >500mA.

Application Scenarios

It can be used for smart home appliances, such as smart curtains, smart bathrooms, range hoods, washing machines, water heaters, air purifiers, humidifiers, etc.; smart lighting products, such as smart desk lamps, ceiling lamps, ambient lights, etc.; voice infrared remote control, etc. It can even be used in dangerous environments where touching instrument need to avoided.

Ai-Thinker: New Possibilities for Voice-Enabled Embedded Products 2

Module Comparison

There are two different modules and development boards available from AI-thinker. and here are the feature list.

Ai-Thinker: New Possibilities for Voice-Enabled Embedded Products 3

Support and Documentation

All the documentation about hardware and firmware development can be found here

From where to Buy VC-01 and VC-02 modules

If you are interested in BU01 indoor positioning modules, you can contact AI-thinker by email (overseas@aithinker.com)

Purchase a sample on Alibaba

Follow Ai-Thinker on LinkedIn

This post is sponsored by Ai-Thinker”


I hope you found this post useful.

If you have any feedback, you can share in the comments section or you can also contact me directly.

Read more interesting articles on Embedded Systems Design.

If you need help on custom embedded product development, do reach out to me.


9 comments

  1. Hello everybody …
    First, while testing the module development kit with my own firmware, I noticed that if one uses the “wake-up free” feature, the VC-02 module stays active and there is no more timeout … This is good ! But “they” claim that there is a possibility of activation via hardware (it seems that it has been used in the factory firmware with the “right” button), and unfortunately I don’t see such a parameter in the SDK development page. It would be fine if the module could be automatically activated at startup (I wanna use it for a model railroad, as a gadget for visiting kids, to show them that there is not only Alexa) and without time out !
    Thanks in advance for any suggestion …

    1. Hello Udaya,

      Thanks for showing interest and participating in the giveaway.

      You are not the winner this time but don’t worry, I am coming up with more giveaways soon.

      Please keep following the blog and my LinkedIn profile for the news.

      Good Luck!

  2. Hello pallav!
    Thanks for sharing about this IC.
    Let’s talk about this IC first, as I can see there many ways to communicate like I2C, UART, etc. This would be really good for use. I tried to studied it’s data sheet also, I can see there they say 5 mtr range and with 150 command support, this is really useful I would Difenetly like to try this IC as I am an EV guy in electronics side of EV, we can make it voice controlled strat, BMS can ve controlled through it, etc. As it is less power consuming and it has FFT accelerator which support upto 1024 point complex FFT operation that will be really helpful in EV segment.
    Now let’s talk about what I would like to use it:-
    So, see As an embedded guy we all can’t restrict use of IC into one segment. So, I would also like to use it many ways firstly as I already said I am EV guy I would like to try in EV BMS and VCU that will be really great as this IC dimension is also small we can use it in fine way. So there are many other ways also like smart home, smart watch, etc.

    Really appreciate your efforts pallav! Once again thanks for sharing.

    1. Hello Devendra,

      Thanks for showing interest and participating in the giveaway.

      You are not the winner this time but don’t worry, I am coming up with more giveaways soon.

      Please keep following the blog and my LinkedIn profile for the news.

      Good Luck!

  3. The article is great
    I would like to make smart goggle parameters display with voice assistant.
    It will show all the datato the goggle screen .
    For eg
    Show voltage of testpoint 1
    What is the frequency of mosfet
    How much current is there .
    It will be really usefull and the smart glasses are already in existence this voice command will take it to another level.

    I would like to make a voice commant test printer with this
    So that it will print my voice commands to an excel sheet while I am performing tests
    As both my hands are busy performing tests.

    1. Hi Zuhaib, thanks for participating in the giveaway.

      You are the 2nd lucky winner for Offline Voice Control Kit by AI-thinker.

      Please share your LinkedIn profile link, I will do a post announcement.

      Good Luck!

  4. Thank you for this article and giveaway. I have few ideas but, I would like to use the VC-02 to make a small voice control smart Bed. This bed will be equipped with motors, electric heated blanket, weight sensors and if I get suitable back massager I can integrate that.
    This Bed will help patients or old person to control different aspects of Bed like height, angle of fold, heating level, massager level etc using voice control. I am also thinking of interfacing it wit IR HAT on Pi, so we can control TV without getting out of the Bed. Voice control will make it much easier to operate this without worrying about where the switches/buttons are and I don’t have to use lot of buttons or complicated menu.

    Thank you again and hope I can make small prototype with the give away module.

    1. Thank you Jitesh for participating in the Giveaway and sharing your Idea. I think its great idea I like this. I am hopeful you will actually create and not just shared for the sake of getting the kit.

      Congratulations you are one of the winner. Please share you LinkedIn profile link. Will do an online announcement 🙂

      Good Luck!

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