Audience looking for a wider audience

By Cai Xiao (China Daily) Updated: 2014-09-05 07:20

"Most of the smartphone vendors and application developers are searching for greener pastures in overseas markets. However, the biggest opportunities are in the developing world, particularly in China "

Santos said he believes that the burgeoning domestic market in China offers huge growth prospects for trendy technology developers and manufacturers. "What Samsung and Apple offered in the past is now being offered by their peers from China," he said, adding that developers have a plethora of smartphone makers from China like Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, Coolpad, Xiaomi, Gionee and Meizu to choose from. Some Chinese smartphone makers like Lenovo and Xiaomi have already made a beginning in this regard, he said.

"Audience, of course, wants to engage with these fast-growing Chinese companies because of the scale of business that they can provide," said Santos. "When we look at the various devices that are made by them, we sight lots of opportunities, as do other foreign companies that hope to enter the Chinese market."

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Audience's cooperation with Xiaomi began in 2012 when it was roped in to reduce the external noise levels in mobile phone calls. The company was tasked with improving the quality of phone calls, to provide speech recognition assistance and boost performance of services like Lingxi, an application provided by China Mobile that is similar to Apple Inc's Siri service. Siri is an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator for iPhone users.

Audience and Xiaomi are also cooperating in additional sectors like voice-and motion - processing technologies, which allows users to tell whether a device is mobile or not. The technologies include those that combine motion processing with voice, as well as the continuous VoiceQ capability, a facility that enables smartphone activation through voice recognition.

Audience and China Mobile have also set up a testing laboratory, and are working with each other on voice quality specifications for 4G VoLTE, a new standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones, as well as on voice and audio quality programs for China Mobile subscribers.

"Our bargaining power, or pricing power, comes from our ability to deliver a compelling user experience, and that ability includes our core technology, sustainable innovation and supporting customers," said Santos.

Audience currently faces competition from a number of companies that produce components for the mobile device audio subsystem, such as Qualcomm Inc. It also competes against solutions internally developed by original equipment manufactures, as well as combined third-party software and hardware systems.

"There is competition in voice processing, but we are better off as our voice processing capabilities are much stronger than most others," said Santos. "As we go to the market this year and in the future, we will look to provide more functions that very few competitors have."

As a listed company, Audience has several reasons to bolster investor confidence, said Santos. "The first is our leading voice technology. But the second drive is the Chinese market," he said, adding that "three out of the top five OEMs in the world will be from China."

The real growth impetus, however, will come from multi-sensory processing and using voice and motion simultaneously.

"I believe that smartphones will over time be based on aspects like energy detectors, microphones, accelerometers, radios, touch panels, smell sensors, etc. They will have a very high degree of intelligence about the operating environment and what the user is doing," said Santos.

He said such technologies would be an integral part of future smartphones, though very few companies actually use them now.

Santos said that in the long term, it would not be surprising to see the big phone makers taking a more conservative approach to growth.