Alexa, Google Home, and Facebook smart devices are becoming more and more commonplace in the home. Although many individuals only use these smart devices to ask for the time or weather, They provide an important edge controller for the Internet of Things infrastructure.

Unknown to some consumers, Alexa and other smart devices contain multiple microphones. Alexa uses these microphones in order to determine the direction of the speaker, and display a light almost as if to “face” the user. This localization function is also very important for processing whatever is about to be said after “Alexa”, or “OK Google”.

In our research lab, this kind of localization is important and we hope to extrapolate more from individuals’ interactions with their home smart speaker. The final details of the experiments we hope to run and not yet concrete. However, we know that we will have to have our own Alexa-like device that can do studio recording with a number of different channels.

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This semester, I was fortunate to be able to toy around with a six-pack of Notch sensors and do some basic motion capture. Later in the semester, I was asked to do a basic comparison of existing motion capture technology that could be used for the tracking of microphone arrays.

Motion capture is necessary for certain projects in our lab because allows us to track the positions of multiple microphones in 3D space. When recording audio, the locations of the microphones are usually fixed, with known values for the difference in position. This known value allows us to determine the relative location of an audio source using triangulation.

For a moving microphone array, the position of each microphone (and the space between them) must be known in order to do correct localization calculations. Currently, our project lead Ryan Corey is using an ultrasonic localization system which requires heavy computing power and is not always accurate.

This segment of my projects is dedicated to determining the effectiveness of Notch for future use in the lab.

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