Snips AIR - Add a voice to your home while protecting your family’s privacy.

Snips AIR is a network of devices collaborating to form a mesh of AI assistants. This enables your entire home to be seamlessly voice-enabled, while protecting your family’s privacy. As Snips AIR runs locally without any voice data being sent to the cloud, no one can spy on you or your kids, keeping your home private as it should be.

Snips, a French startup aims to compete with the likes of Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, with the launch of a voice assistant, powered by blockchain-based artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, the product guarantees better protection of users’ personal data.

The voice assistant, named Snips AIR, will be available for clients at the end of 2019. It would be the first ever privacy-focused, decentralized voice platform.

Snips AIR will not use cloud to process data pertaining to a user and his family. Instead, the system will process all data within the device. In this manner, total data privacy is guaranteed. Snaps AIR has also claimed that its platform will resolve several issues faced by prevailing voice assistants.

Snips AIR uses a network of devices, instead of one, to create a mesh of AI assistants. Furthermore, Snips AIR processes data internally, without sending it to the cloud. The network of AIR devices communicate with each other using the shared, open source AIRnet protocol, which is made up of an abstraction layer and an ontology layer. Interestingly, any device manufacturer will be able to use the AIRnet protocol.

AIR devices
Anyone can build an AIR device, either by implementing the underlying protocol, or simply by integrating the Snips voice assistant in their product. We are launching a Snips device in 2019, consisting of a base station (AIR Base) and portable microphones (AIR Satellites).

AIR Base
The AIR Base is a powerful hub capable of executing voice apps. Voice input is streamed from the AIR Satellites to the AIR Base for local processing. It is the "brain" of the Snips AIR system. It is running Debian, and is fully customizable. The main purpose of the AIR Base is to do the heavy processing of voice queries and handle app execution, so that less powerful AIR devices can just forward their queries to it.

AIR Satellite
The AIR satellite is a battery-powered, MCU-based portable microphone. It enables you to control your devices with voice, wherever you are in your home. It is tactile and context-aware, enabling multimodal interactions such as dimming the lights in the room you are in by swiping up and down. Switching context is as simple as asking it to: “Hey Snips, switch to the music app!”

At the time of launch, Snips AIR will also include a number of built-in applications such as weather, home automation, multimedia, date/time, reminders, calendars, and cooking. Developers will not only be able to create apps for Snips AIR, but also publish them on a decentralized app store called the Snips Skill Store, which runs over the custom built blockchain.

For more info visit their website https://air.snips.ai/