Room microphone?

[Mike308]

So the various Alexa, Echo, Homepod devices can listen to commands from a single point anywhere in the room. Do these use some sort of special microphone? If anybody can share some guidance it'll save me from some long trial-and-error.

[Pfeil]

Amazon Echo uses 7 microphones, Google Home uses 2.

The ones in Home are manufactured by Invensense(A TDK subsidiary), but while searching for the part# in Echo does point to Knowles, there's no specific part in their catalog that matches it(as far as I can see).

These microphones aren't "special" per-se, but they are selected, mounted, and connected for room-scale use.


You'd probably have the best chance of getting good audio to VoiceAttack by using a conference-calling microphone of some description, provided it doesn't cut off too many frequencies internally(traditional phone calls tend to have very low bandwith). This one even has a review stating it works well with voice recognition, specifically.

Though, keep in mind that the devices you're referring to use cloud-based speech recognition, which the offline Microsoft speech recognition engines probably can't match(if only because they have less computational power and much less reference material available to them).

[iceblast]

I don't know anything about this, but it sounds very much like what Alexa from Amazon uses.

https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/uma-8-microphone-array