Premier Farnell, the Development Distributor, is shipping the MATRIX Voice from MATRIX Labs, available from Farnell element14 in Europe, element14 in Asia Pacific and Newark element14 in North America. The MATRIX Voice enables users, makers, and developers to create IoT applications based on sound driven behaviours, quickly and efficiently.

As the Internet of Things continues to expand, the prospect of developing unique IoT solutions should excite makers, engineers, and hobbyists. However, the process of successfully integrating artificial intelligence, hardware, and software in order to create a viable solution can be both expensive and time-consuming. The MATRIX Voice aims to lower the barriers to entry for the creation and deployment of IoT voice applications.

Powered by a Raspberry Pi computer or used as a standalone device with the ESP32, the MATRIX Voice specifically targets the development of voice recognition and detection projects, allowing users to utilise existing platforms such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, or any other voice recognition API. The platform gives users the ability to integrate custom voice and hardware-accelerated machine learning easily into their applications. Beamforming, noise cancellation, far-field speech recognition, and de-reverberation capabilities ensure high quality performance for all voice applications.

Hari Kalyanaraman, Global Head of Emerging Businesses for Premier Farnell said: “As the Development Distributor, we strive to provide our customers with the very latest technology to help them as they bring their products to market. Platforms such as the MATRIX Voice give makers and entrepreneurs a real head start, enabling them to shrink their product development cycle and accelerate time to market.”

Rodolfo Saccoman, CEO and Co-Founder of MATRIX Labs says : “At MATRIX Labs, we aim to democratize the intersection between hardware, AI, and software. We have created hardware and accompanying operating systems to enable solutions, creations, and new companies to succeed. Instead of a company trying to build their own board, they can package our MATRIX Voice, manufacture any kind of casing, and then take their product to market- fast."

The MATRIX Voice board, at 3.14 inches in diameter, features a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA, 64 Mbit SDRAM, a 8 MEMS microphone array, and 18 LEDs among other features including an optional Wi-Fi attachment. 64 GPIO expansion pins—40 of which are used to connect to a Raspberry Pi—allow for additional customization.

MATRIX Voice is available from Farnell element14 in Europe, element14 in Asia Pacific and Newark element14 in North America.

 Premier Farnell, the Development Distributor, announces an exclusive partnership with MATRIX Labs to manufacture and distribute MATRIX Creator to a global network of developers and makers of all skills levels. The MATRIX Creator is a Raspberry Pi add-on that provides multiple functionality and enables faster and more cost-effective development of IoT devices.

MATRIX Creator is ideally suited for the development of applications in automation control systems, particularly for home automation systems involving optical and sound elements as well as robotics, enterprise logistics, voice assistants, beamforming/DoA algorithms, retail intelligence. The microphone array, for example, allows a user to develop their own “do it yourself” Amazon Echo and Alexa based projects as well as voice recognition systems, with the eight microphones allowing devices to be activated from anywhere in a room. Similarly, the optical and physical sensors enable the development of facial recognition and motion detection devices for security applications.

MATRIX Creator is an ideal aid for teaching novices about hardware development and provides expert users with an extremely versatile piece of hardware to add to their suite of development tools. It accelerates and reduces the overall cost of the prototyping process for new products and devices, doing the up-front heavy lifting so developers don’t have to.

The development board, designed for Raspberry Pi, incorporates a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, an ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, a range of sensors for motion, temperature, humidity, light, ultraviolet and infrared, an 8-microphone array and a 35-LED array.

The board, which can be programmed in 40 different languages, also incorporates integrated Z-Wave and zigbee communications plus connectivity via a wide range of analogue and digital input/output interfaces. It can also be used in stand-alone mode using its onboard processing capability.

Ralf Buehler, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Premier Farnell said: “As the Development Distributor we work to source the latest innovative technology to help create opportunities for our existing and future builders, developers, makers and engineers. Products like MATRIX Creator provide huge flexibility to users - unlike existing add-ons which only provide individual elements of functionality, MATRIX Creator is a complete development eco-system that allows users to access a range of functionality to enhance any Raspberry Pi based project, speeding up the design process and helping to overcome the hurdles involved in the creation of innovative hardware projects.”

Rodolfo Saccoman, CEO and Co-Founder of MATRIX Labs says “MATRIX Creator is a hugely exciting product, doing for the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, what smartphones did for the mobile revolution. MATRIX Creator has deep product functionality and we expect broad appeal - it’s the perfect combination of an easy-to-use yet also sophisticated dev board, which appeals to the maker, the expert developer, and everyone in between. MATRIX Creator allows developers of virtually any skill-level to create whatever exists in their mind’s eye, shifting the product development paradigm from one that relies on a 3rd party to create for you, to one where you can create the custom app that meets your exact needs. It’s putting power into the hands of the people and democratizing IoT app development.”

MATRIX Creator is available from Farnell element14 in Europe, CPC in the UK and Newark element14 and MCM Electronics in North America.

About MATRIX Labs

MATRIX Labs is a complete ecosystem of IoT dev tools that also include MATRIX Voice, MATRIX OS, and MATRIX App Store. Together, the MATRIX ecosystem makes IoT app development easier, and more affordable than ever before. MATRIX OS is the application hosting platform for the MATRIX Creator and MATRIX Voice, which uses machine learning and computer vision libraries to expedite the development of complex apps. IoT applications will be bought, sold, uploaded and installed from the first-ever IoT app marketplace, the MATRIX App Store, which will support MATRIX OS, Android Things and future IoT platforms.