Vodafone Portugal has reached an agreement with Universal Electronics Inc. to offer Nevo Butler – UEI’s voice-enabled entertainment and smart home hub – to its TV and broadband customers. The white label product produced by UEI enables service providers to create their own digital assistants (similar to Amazon’s Alexa) for their branded hub, which can be integrated into their existing infrastructure. Vodafone Portugal’s customers who use Nevo Butler will be able to use voice command to search through Vodafone’s libraries and video playback, as well as control the audio and power functions of televisions in the household. Nevo Butler is only being used by Vodafone Portugal for entertainment control, although service providers can integrate control of other home systems.
Kuldip Singh Johal, VP of Sales Subscription at Universal Electronics Inc. says “The way our solution works is that, once its connected to the set-top-box, it basically mimics a remote control. It’s no different except it doesn’t have buttons.” He highlights the important assistance a hands-free hub could provide to elderly or physically impaired users and believes we are “getting closer everyday” to it being common for households to control entertainment and other homes systems through voice command, via a central device.
The hub for Vodafone Portugal customers will come with a digital assistant that has been customised for the company. Users can alert the smart hub it is being addressed by saying the wake-word “Hola TOBi” and it also has a number of pre-programmed offline commands. Training the product to be voice-responsive involved UEI and its partnered third-party companies taking a cross-geographical representation of Portuguese speaking people – across different age and gender demographics – and recording them saying the wake word and offline commands 10-12 times.
Johal elaborates: “Then we basically take those recordings and put them through a model and what that model does is creates a code that produces minimal false negatives. More importantly, if I say ‘Hola TOBi’ in many different voices, the device knows there’s an action to be had there.”
Another key feature of Nevo Butler is its capacity to support alternative digital assistants that are integrated into the household device ecosystem, and accommodate different wake words for each. The hub can talk to these third-party digital assistants and accept their commands, too. Johal gives the example of asking your Google device to turn on the TV: “You could talk to your Google device and say ‘hey watch tv’ and the Google device, from cloud to cloud, would talk to our Nevo Butler and execute the command of turning on the TV, turning on the set-top-box and turning the TV to the right input. That’s what it means to have interoperability.”
According to Johal, Nevo Butler manages the complexity arising from the need to accommodate changing protocols and SDKs of home devices, as well as onboarding new devices. “When you go out and say ‘my smart hub connects to everything’, that’s actually quite a useless statement to make,” he remarked, “because, what you’ll tend to find is that you’ll come across devices that you just won’t be able to communicate with, as you haven’t implemented them properly”.
UEI works with its clients to create a “white list” of third-party devices which it tracks for SDK or API changes, and updates the Nevo Butler in response to these changes to ensure interoperability and a “seamless experience”. The company onboards and manages new devices through its ‘Works with Quickset’ programme according to clients requirements.
Johal also reveals that Nevo Butler will begin implementing Matter – a home automation connectivity standard used by a significant number of companies that he believes simplifies the ability of devices to identify, connect and talk to each other.
