Imagine an energy efficient IC for a small multimodal model that can do voice to text, text to speech, question/answer, tool calling, and structured output.
Wire that up to a microcontroller that parses the structured output to constrain the model (rather than giving the model direct hardware access).
Now you have an assistive tech mode for supporting vision impaired users without requiring them to configure an app on their phone, pair devices, etc. And so now the user can just speak to the washing machine to tell it what to do.
And because models are getting better and better at multi-language support, you can rely on a single model to cover a wide range of spoken languages. And therefore you don't need a bunch of variants of this chip for a single product line.
TLDR this gives a path to replace "always online" and "wifi enabled" devices with fully on-device capabilities without being forced to abandon assistive technology support.
I don't think that the ability to record and transcribe people's words will encourage manufacturers to remove Wi-Fi functionality. If anything, that would encourage them to keep it. Imagine the marketing possibilities.
sure but once the capability is there it's not unlikely we'll see regulatory pressure from regions like the EU or certain US states to ban or heavily limit sale of "collect all your data" wifi enabled devices.
IMHO the only reason there's not been pushback from the EU already is because so much assistive tech is only possible with wireless connectivity currently. Once privacy conscious assistive tech is viable those crackdowns will probably be on the horizon even if only for the security risk associated with millions of internet connected devices with poor security posture.
Imagine an energy efficient IC for a small multimodal model that can do voice to text, text to speech, question/answer, tool calling, and structured output.
Wire that up to a microcontroller that parses the structured output to constrain the model (rather than giving the model direct hardware access).
Now you have an assistive tech mode for supporting vision impaired users without requiring them to configure an app on their phone, pair devices, etc. And so now the user can just speak to the washing machine to tell it what to do.
And because models are getting better and better at multi-language support, you can rely on a single model to cover a wide range of spoken languages. And therefore you don't need a bunch of variants of this chip for a single product line.
TLDR this gives a path to replace "always online" and "wifi enabled" devices with fully on-device capabilities without being forced to abandon assistive technology support.