Jason P. Rhode - Cirrus Logic, Inc.
Analyst · Dougherty & Company
Sure. Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, there's – it's a different problem to solve and a different level of technology needed to solve it. There's a couple of things that are different. So, one, voice biometrics at a forensic kind of grade, so fingerprint-level-type authentication can be done and has been done in the cloud. When you call into your bank and try to do transactions and whatnot, it's very frequently the case that they've got a server-based thing sitting there trying to validate you against a database of known voices for fraud protection. And that's actually the origin of the technology that we're working on. The difference is we're trying to render it down to an embeddable format to go into, initially at least, handsets because we see that as being the biggest opportunity for the technology in the short term. So, in that context, if you're going to do biometric authentication, it's definitely important to have the entirety of the authentication be done in the device. The FIDO Security Alliance doesn't allow you to go off and store whatever you're authenticating against in the cloud, for example. Now, it's really different than what you would do for a voice assistant where, say, a couple and a couple of kids in a house have all got different permissions or you want to know when I say play my favorite song, it plays mine, and not my wife's. But at the end of the day, if you get that wrong, it's not that big of a deal. And I think most of the stuff that we've seen thus far in a lot of the voice assistants have been that grade. You wouldn't – well, some people would allow it to read their e-mail. I personally would not. And I don't know that you would get to a 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 50,000 or whatever your metric is, false accept rate for somebody trying to crack into your financial transactions, for example, or other sensitive information. So it's pretty different. Now, that said, we've had interest from people in the smart home, that's a secondary target for us after handsets. But handsets, clearly, there's a ton of interest obviously right now in biometrics of all sort. Voice is kind of unique in that it is clearly the best one to use for things that are voice-as-an-interface-type products. And additionally, it's the only biometric that you don't have to touch or aim at your face or do other things with. And those are all great technologies too. But when you're trying to use voice as an interface, voice is really pretty uniquely well served to work with that. And we've seen a ton of interest from a wide range of customers around the technology, and we think that what we're trying to deliver in an embedded form factor is relatively unique at this time. So it's something we're really excited about. And I got to say the team – there's a ton of new in that device and we are by no means done. So I don't want anybody getting all overly – overheated about it in the short term. But, man, what an incredible accomplishment by the technical teams involved in developing the product, spec-ing it out, having our first production oriented device in 28-nanometer, having the Rev 8.0 (10:02) silicon come back and work and be demo-able to customers, that's really a pretty amazing, amazing accomplishment right out of the gate. So kudos to that team. Anyway, thanks for your question.