LG fridges, TVs to leverage embedded AI to distinguish human voices

LG Electronics Inc., an industry frontrunner in applying artificial intelligence to home appliances, has unveiled a new speaker identification technology that can distinguish human voices.

At Interspeech 2022, an international academic conference in Incheon that began on Sunday for a five-day run, LG unveiled three papers on AI-based voice recognition technologies.

Major global tech companies, including Google, Meta Platforms and Amazon, are participating in the forum, hosted by the International Speech Communications Association (ISCA).

According to LG, if four people speak in a room, its AI technology will analyze their presence and identify their different voices.

With its user-defined activation function, users can make LG devices execute their commands, it said.

NO ‘HI LG’

“If you pre-register command words such as ‘hey, a cup of water,’ the water purifier will give you a cup of water. You won’t be bound by the pre-set call words of home appliance makers such as 'Hi LG',” said a company official.

LG said it plans to apply its new AI technologies to water purifiers, refrigerators and TVs within the next few years.

LG has already applied its speech recognition technology to several home appliances such as robot vacuum cleaners, air conditioners and washing machines.

Last month, it launched the Puricare Objet Collection Water Purifier with a voice recognition function. Its TVs support speech recognition in 22 languages, ​including Arabic.

LG Group said it will invest 200 billion won ($166 million) by 2023 to foster AI talent with an aim to secure about 1,000 experts in the sector by 2030.

In December 2020, it launched LG AI Research to spearhead the group’s AI-related technology development projects.

Last year, it unveiled Exaone, a supergiant AI, which has some 300 billion parameters and is equipped with multimodal capabilities to acquire and process information related to nearly all aspects of human communication.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.