Voice Assistant Devices Explained MediaTek’s Hardware and AI Advantage

1. Voice Assistant Devices Explained MediaTek’s Hardware and AI Advantage We are living in a smart world, where everything from the humble light bulb and speaker to power sockets has moved to the smart side of things. As a result, voice assistant devices have quietly moved from novelty to necessity, acting as the control layer that keeps modern smart homes running. What began with simple voice commands for weather updates or alarms has evolved into a deeply integrated layer of modern computing. Today, the AI voice assistant experience spans smartphones, smart speakers, smart TVs, home appliances, and even cars, transforming how users interact with technology. Behind this shift lies a complex combination of hardware capability, power efficiency, artificial intelligence, and connectivity. This is where MediaTek’s role becomes particularly significant.

2. Why Hardware Matters More Than Ever At the heart of every home assistant voice experience is a processor or system-on-chip that must balance multiple tasks at once. These include always-on listening, wake word detection, speech recognition, contextual understanding, and response generation. When these tasks rely entirely on the cloud, latency increases and connectivity becomes a bottleneck. On the other hand, running everything on the CPU alone leads to sharp rises in power consumption. This is where specialized hardware becomes essential. MediaTek addresses this challenge by designing chipsets with dedicated AI processing units, advanced digital signal processors (DSPs), and tightly integrated CPU and GPU clusters. This approach allows voice workloads to be distributed intelligently across the chip, rather than overloading a single component. MediaTek’s AI and DSP Advantage One of MediaTek’s key strengths lies in its AI processing architecture. Across its Dimensity smartphone platforms and IoT-focused chipsets, MediaTek integrates neural processing units designed to handle AI voice assistant workloads efficiently. These accelerators are well suited for tasks such as keyword spotting, speech-to-text conversion, and noise suppression.

3. This separation of responsibilities allows smart speakers, smart displays, and voice-enabled TVs to remain responsive around the clock without excessive power draw. In real-world usage, this translates into offline voice commands on smartphones, faster responses on smart displays, and more accurate voice recognition even in crowded or noisy rooms. Optimized for Android and Beyond MediaTek has long been a major platform provider for Android, making its approach especially relevant for a voice assistant for Android ecosystems. Android voice assistants must deliver consistent performance across a wide range of price points, from entry-level devices to premium flagships. Entry-level and midrange MediaTek platforms integrate optimized audio processing pipelines alongside AI acceleration through MediaTek’s NeuroPilot framework, enabling efficient on- device execution of common voice-related tasks. Through this combination of hardware acceleration and software optimization, features such as voice typing, assistant-based search, and basic speech recognition can be handled locally on the device. Offloading portions of these workloads from the main CPU helps reduce latency and improves power efficiency, which is particularly important for smartphones operating within limited thermal and battery constraints.

4. On higher-end Dimensity platforms, these capabilities are extended through more powerful AI Processing Units and a heterogeneous computing architecture designed to support higher on- device AI throughput. This enables more advanced inference workloads related to speech processing, audio enhancement, and contextual understanding to run directly on the device, reducing reliance on continuous cloud connectivity. As a result, AI voice assistant interactions can feel faster and more responsive, while maintaining consistent performance in varied real-world conditions and preserving user privacy through increased local processing. Beyond smartphones, MediaTek platforms are widely used in smart TVs, smart displays, routers, and IoT hubs. Voice-controlled TVs and displays rely on far-field microphones, real-time speech recognition, and low-latency responses, all of which benefit from MediaTek’s integrated AI and audio processing capabilities. Power Efficiency and Always-on Intelligence Power efficiency remains one of the biggest challenges for any voice home assistant. A device that heats up or drains battery during simple voice interactions cannot scale effectively. MediaTek’s focus on heterogeneous computing directly addresses this issue. By intelligently distributing always-on voice tasks across AI accelerators, DSPs, and CPUs, MediaTek enables continuous listening without compromising battery life. This is especially important for smart speakers that operate around the clock and for mobile devices where battery endurance defines the user experience. Real-World Devices and Global Scale MediaTek’s hardware already powers a wide range of voice-enabled products across global markets. In emerging regions in particular, MediaTek platforms have helped bring voice assistant devices to millions of users who rely heavily on voice input due to language diversity or accessibility needs. This scale matters. Voice assistants improve with broader data diversity, supporting more languages, accents, and usage patterns. Delivering this capability requires hardware that can evolve with AI models while remaining affordable and energy efficient. The Road Ahead As voice assistants evolve toward more conversational and generative interactions, hardware demands will continue to increase. Larger language models, contextual memory, and

5. multimodal inputs that combine voice with vision will require even more efficient on-device AI acceleration. MediaTek’s roadmap aligns closely with this future. By continuing to invest in NPUs, edge AI, and energy-efficient architectures, MediaTek is positioning itself as a key enabler of next- generation voice assistant devices, powering everything from smartphones and smart homes to automotive and enterprise IoT ecosystems.