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1. Voice is appearing in more kinds of devices and environments
Voice-enabled audio is no longer limited to smart speakers. The idea is to place microphones and voice-aware software in the environments where people already work or use devices: appliances, bathrooms, furniture, healthcare interactions, vehicles, helmets, kiosks and service settings. In each case, the device must capture useful sound in its physical context; adding a microphone alone does not make an interaction reliable.
Listening beyond the vehicle cabin
HARMAN announced a Sound and Vibration Sensor and an External Microphone on January 4, 2023. HARMAN says the products can support emergency-vehicle siren detection, exterior speech commands, glass-break detection and vehicle-impact detection. The company describes the sensor as sealed and designed for unobtrusive exterior integration. This is a notable extension of embedded audio: sound is used not only for entertainment or a spoken command, but also as a signal about what is happening around a vehicle. The announcement describes product capabilities; it does not establish detection accuracy or performance under particular road conditions.
2. Voice can become the primary user interface
In a hands-free setting, spoken commands can reduce reliance on touchscreens or physical controls. That can suit vehicles, kitchens, helmets, kiosks, robots and service interactions, but whether voice should be the main interface depends on the task and environment. A command interface must recognize speech amid competing sound, respond clearly and provide an alternative when speaking is inconvenient or recognition fails.
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DSP Concepts identifies voice assistants, natural ordering, robots that hear and respond, and connected living environments as deployment contexts for embedded audio processing. These examples illustrate the breadth of the interaction model, not a claim that voice has replaced other controls in those settings.
3. 3D audio extends spatial sound beyond games and films
3D audio uses spatial cues to make sound seem to come from particular directions or positions, rather than simply from a left-right stereo image. That can support a stronger sense of presence in entertainment, but spatial audio also has potential in interactive interfaces, recordings, playback and device feedback. The practical value depends on the experience being designed: a spatial effect is useful when location or movement adds information or immersion, not merely because a system can render it.
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The Khronos Group’s OpenSL ES documentation lists 3D positional audio among embedded capabilities and names interactive audio, gaming, recording, playback and device UI audio as target applications. Khronos describes OpenSL ES as a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems. The API documentation establishes support and intended application areas; it does not mean every device implementing it has the same spatial features or output hardware.
4. Noise suppression makes far-field voice capture more practical
Far-field microphones must capture a speaker from a distance while handling room noise, loud background sound and audio played by the device itself. Owens’ five-trend framework groups several techniques under noise suppression: noise cancellation, echo cancellation, ambient-noise reduction and beamforming. These address different parts of the problem. Echo cancellation targets audio from the device’s own loudspeaker returning into its microphones; ambient-noise reduction seeks to lessen unwanted surrounding sound; beamforming uses microphone-array processing to emphasize sound from a chosen direction.
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- 360° Far-Field Voice Capture: Four MEMS microphones in a circular array support speech pickup from different directions at distances up to 5 m, so users do not need to speak toward one fixed microphone position.
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Reliable capture is a system-level task. Microphone placement and acoustic design affect what reaches the sensors, while signal processing and software tuning determine how the device treats that signal. As a result, adding one processing feature is not by itself proof that a device will hear a distant speaker clearly in every environment. The relevant evaluation should reflect the actual acoustic setting and use case.
5. Hardware and software are being designed together
Microphones, speakers, codecs and processors set the physical and compute boundaries for an audio product; software shapes how it listens, processes and reproduces sound. HARMAN’s original trend description points to software functions such as enhancement, automatic equalization, noise reduction and conferencing. Current Audio Weaver materials from DSP Concepts describe real-time processing, adaptive listening, spatial sound and machine learning, with deployment contexts including automotive, personal devices, collaborative rooms, robots, hospitality and smart homes.
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Automotive audio becomes a connected system
STMicroelectronics describes Audio over Ethernet as a way to distribute synchronized, multichannel audio among vehicle zonal controllers, amplifiers, microphones and other endpoints while reducing dedicated wiring. Its described architecture uses IEEE 1722 AVTP for audio-video transport and IEEE 802.1AS/PTP for timing. This approach makes synchronization and network design part of the audio system, rather than treating each audio endpoint as an isolated component.
Low-power designs balance always-on listening with energy use
Renesas’ Bluetooth LE Audio Player reference design targets smart helmets and voice-controlled speakers. Its undated current product page specifies an always-on codec at 650 µW and also lists a 35 µA quiescent-current power variant. Those figures describe different electrical quantities and should not be treated as directly comparable or as a complete estimate of a finished product’s power consumption. They illustrate why embedded audio designs must account for both the function expected to remain available and the power budget of the full device.
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Portability and deployment still depend on the implementation
Khronos positions OpenSL ES as a cross-platform embedded API with low-latency access, recording, playback and 3D positional audio. An API can provide a common software interface, but actual behavior still depends on the device, operating environment, hardware support and chosen processing chain. For a product team, the practical comparison is therefore broader than audio quality alone: interaction mode, spatial capability, resistance to noise and echo, compute and power budgets, latency and synchronization, connectivity, portability, privacy and deployment context all matter.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How the five trends fit together
The trends are related but not interchangeable. Putting a microphone in a new location creates a need to understand the local sound environment; making voice the main interface raises the cost of recognition failures; noise suppression helps address difficult capture conditions; spatial audio changes how playback communicates position; and hardware-software integration determines whether these capabilities can work together within power, latency and connectivity limits.
HARMAN and Futuresource Consulting reported in 2019 that 90 percent of more than 8,000 consumers surveyed across six countries considered sound integral to life. That is a dated corporate survey result, not a current market estimate. It offers context for why audio matters to product design, but it does not measure adoption of any of these five embedded-audio trends.
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