Picovoice announces the public availability of Shepherd: the first no-code platform for building voice interfaces on Microcontrollers. Shepherd enables creating voice experiences similar to Alexa that run on microcontrollers — without writing a single line of code. Picovoice AI runs entirely on-device, without requiring internet connectivity. Edge voice interfaces built with Picovoice are private, reliable, zero-latency, and cost-effective, distinguishing them from cloud-based alternatives.
Microcontrollers are small, low-power, and cost-effective compute modules. They have already been deployed into billions of devices. The ability to bring voice AI to microcontrollers unlocks numerous use cases that are otherwise infeasible. Alas, the technical-complexities and various specialized skills needed to train and deploy voice AI intro microcontrollers have limited their wide adoption for speech recognition. Today, only a handful of tech giants have access to this technology.
Shepherd — together with Picovoice Console — streamlines adding voice AI into microcontrollers. Shepherd dramatically simplifies a process that previously would have taken months of R&D by teams of scientists and engineers to what can be undertaken by a non-technical individual in under an hour. This significantly reduces risk and time to market. The no-code aspect of Shepherd empowers developers, product owners, and designers to create voice interfaces that run entirely on a power-efficient and bargain-priced microcontroller. No coding or machine learning expertise is required.
Customers can create voice models within their browsers instantly, using Picovoice Console. Once the models are trained, they can be downloaded and loaded onto a microcontroller using Picovoice Shepherd, without any embedded expertise. The process takes only minutes, end-to-end. Go to Picovoice Console and sign up for free to train voice models tailored for your use case. Install Shepherd on a desktop computer following its documentation. Get one of the supported development boards from any major electronics retailer and start building today!
Picovoice Shepherd is free. Picovoice Console is free for personal use (e.g. students, researchers, and tinkerers) and offers a 30-day free trial for enterprise users. The enterprise accounts start from USD 400 per month, charged per annum. Shepherd supports popular Arm Cortex-M-based microcontrollers from ST and NXP, with additional support on the way.
