audio

Devialet launches a high-end portable speaker • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in audio, Devialet, Devialet Mania, Gadgets, Speaker, StartupsNo Comments

When you say portable speakers, most people think about cheap Bluetooth speakers that you can easily put in your backpack when you’re going to the park. But Devialet has something different in mind with the Devialet Mania. The French high-end speaker maker wants to make the most luxurious and best sounding portable speaker around. The Devialet Mania costs $790 (€790) and is available today. “We are launching a new product, the Devialet Mania. And it represents the end of a long process. We started with amps, then there were the Phantom speakers, the Gemini earbuds and the Dione soundbar,” Devialet CEO Franck Lebouchard told me. “We are entering a new market with this portable speaker.” When Devialet decided to build a portable speaker four years ago, the concept was quite simple. Devialet wanted to design a speaker that works on battery, but a hi-fi speaker. “Hi-fi means a lot of things. It means great sound quality of course. Hi-fi also means stereo sound or at least stereo rendering,” Lebouchard said. The Devialet Mania is a spherical speaker with no front or back. There is a handle at the top of the device that invites users to pick it up and carry it around. But you won’t put it in your backpack to go to the park as it weighs 2.3kg (around 5 pounds). You can take it with you when you go on vacation, but it has mostly been designed to carry around the house. Image Credits: ZebethMedia When you start playing music, the first thing that you are going to notice are the two woofers that are set up in a ‘push-push’ configuration to avoid unwanted vibrations. At the top of the device, there are four full-range speakers each pointing in a different direction. When you put the Devialet Mania on a table in the middle of the room, the full-range speakers alternatively broadcast the left channel or the right channel (clockwise: left, right, left, right). This way, wherever you sit, you mostly hear sound from the two full-range speakers that are in front of you — and you get stereo sound. There are four microphones in the device as well as an accelerometer. The Devialet Mania detects when it has been moved to a new location. Thanks to its built-in microphones, it can also detect when it’s next to a wall. In that case, the Devialet Mania determines the front and back of the device. The two full-range speakers on the left of the device broadcast the left channel, while the two speakers on the right broadcast the right channel. Using microphones to actively adapt the sound of the speaker was one of the selling points of Apple’s original HomePod. But Devialet insists on sound quality as well, such as its SAM proprietary technology (Speaker Active Matching). “We are the only ones that combine portable, hi-fi and automatic calibration,” Lebouchard said. The Devialet Mania works with Devialet’s own app and features both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. On Wi-Fi, it supports AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect. The battery is supposed to last 10 hours at a normal volume. There are some built-in buttons that let you pause the music, change the volume, activate Bluetooth and more. There’s a single USB-C port on the device for charging. And because the Devialet Mania has microphones, the company is integrating Amazon Alexa for the first time. You can disable the feature entirely with a physical slider button near the USB-C port. In addition to the base model that comes in black or white, there’s a $990 (€990) ‘Opéra de Paris’ model with gold-plated finishes and an optional docking station — the base can also be purchased separately. “If we want to become a global player in the audio industry, we need to have a product in each major segment of the audio market — wireless earbuds, soundbars and portable speakers,” Lebouchard said. According to him, portable speakers and soundbars each generate €6 billion in sales every year. Image Credits: Devialet As for the company’s older products, Devialet released an update to its Phantom speakers in January 2021 with newer components and a matte finish. “With Phantom, we release a big update every couple of years,” Lebouchard said. When it comes to amplifiers, the Expert Pro was the company’s first product but it hasn’t been updated in a while. “Amps aren’t a priority for us because it’s a very small market. But the Expert is an important product for our brand, for audiophile enthusiasts. We want to make the best amplifier in the world because we can’t say that we are the company with the best sound in the world without selling the best amplifier in the world,” Lebouchard said. So I guess it means “stay tuned.” Over the past year and a half, Devialet has shipped wireless earbuds, a soundbar and a portable speaker. Lebouchard told me that there’s one missing product in the lineup — and it’s headphones. But don’t hold your breath for Devialet headphones as the company is not sure it would be a strategic move. “When you go outside, people moved on from headphones to wireless earbuds,” Lebouchard said. Image Credits: ZebethMedia

Musixmatch launches a podcast platform for transcription driven by AI and community • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Apps, audio, musixmatch, podcast, transcriptionNo Comments

Italy-based company Musixmatch is well-known for providing community-powered lyrics to major music streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal. Now it’s launching a new platform for podcasts that combines AI-generated transcription and community-verified editing. While there are millions of podcast shows and episodes available for listeners, Musixmatch argues that podcast search is broken. As a result, it suggests a lot of great podcasts don’t get connected to potential fans. So it’s using its experience in training AI models through lyrics and leveraging its NLP (natural language processing) expertise to improve podcast transcription, search, discovery, and sharing. Musixmatch’s podcast platform automatically generates transcription every day for some of the top podcast episodes across different topics and charts. It’s using its NLP base model architecture, Umberto, to tag keywords such as places, people, and topics with Wikipedia IDs — alphanumeric IDs that are linked to topics on Wikipedia. (For instance, this link indicates a Wikipedia ID related to ZebethMedia.) Because of this approach, it says people searching for these topics in any language will get accurate results. The startup explained to ZebethMedia that based on these IDs it creates a topics graph called TopicRank which ranks podcasts based on factors like the number of mentions in an episode or the presenters’ expertise on the topic — enhancing search results for podcasts when users are looking for related topics. Image Credits: Musixmatch “Thanks to this classification, people can finally search for any particular keyword and find transcribed podcasts that match their query, ordered by their relevance. Our search index returns an array of results that is much more detailed and in-depth than any other listening services that rely on standard RSS metadata and predefined genres and categories,” the company claimed. When users search on Musixmatch’s podcast platform, it shows snippets from transcriptions where the searched phrase is mentioned. If they click on the result, the podcast will start playing direct from the timestamp of the snippet that mentions the phrase. That’s pretty neat for when you need to listen to a couple of minutes of audio while researching something. Musixmatch has long relied on its community to make accurate edits to lyrics, and now it’s asking these users to do the same with podcasts. The company’s new podcast portal also includes a tool called Podcast Studio, which allows editors and podcast owners to mend the AI-generated transcription — especially handy for things like people and brand names or cultural references. If there is no transcript for a particular episode the owner or community member can use the Podcast Studio to generate one. Musixmatch says it takes roughly five minutes for AI to generate a transcript for an episode. Regular listeners can also upvote an episode for transcription so the community prioritizes those. Image Credits: Musixmatch It’s important to note that on Musixmatch’s platform AI-generated transcription will have tags such as “Speaker 1” and “Speaker 2,” while Community-edited episodes will have labels with speakers’ names — along with a “verified” label. Human-curated podcast transcription and tags Image Credits: Musixmatch The company is also making sharing easier by displaying cards that have text snippets from the podcast with a shareable link. What’s more, it’s working on a feature called audiograms, which are small sharable videos that include audio and scrolling text snippets from a podcast. Image Credits: Musixmatch Musixmatch doesn’t want to keep all this data to itself. It is allowing podcast owners to export transcriptions to their web feeds and apps. And since these texts are SEO-friendly it argues it will make it easier for listeners to search for them. Some Musixmatch partners it says are using its tools for transcription include “The Talent Show” by The Financial Times; “Beyond the Ordinary” and “Why I Run” by Red Bull; and Chroa Media’s entire production. While Musixmatch’s podcasts platform offer features for listeners, it is not trying to be just a podcast player. The startup argues its competitors are companies that work in the audio analytics space — including apps that provide transcription services (such as Podcastle). “We think that audio analysis (AI, semantic etc) will be a must-have in the near future, for many different use cases. We are in a unique position to provide that service for podcasts because of our AI-powered content analysis tech, our engaged community, and our role within DSPs [demand side platforms], for which we syndicate third-party content already,” the company’s chief product officer, Marco Paglia, told ZebethMedia over email. He added that one of the goals for the company is to become a verified transcription provider for other services — just like its offerings in the lyrics space.