Challenge
A major technology company had made the decision to build a smart home assistant that provided next generation video calling. This device would need to be able to track motion and stream video at high speed which would require the integration of several emerging technologies, including computer vision and machine learning.
The company, however, lacked the skills within the domain knowledge required to bring this new consumer product to market. They needed support to conduct feasibility studies, develop the core platform and applications, and test the technology.
Solution
To bridge this initial skills gap, the company selected Mobica to act as technology consultant for a feasibility study. As the relationship grew Mobica then provided development and testing support in the production implementation phase.
Working with our customer, both on and offsite, we were also responsible for media stack optimisation and media protocols (including WebRTC), as well as the Android framework. This work included the implementation of gesture functionality to track motion, and live video image recognition to optimise video streaming bandwidth to areas of the video that contained people
We also supported the development of a computer vision data pipeline. This included the creation of a data sampler that was able to handle the large amounts of data needed for parsing, validating, extracting metadata and publishing.
In addition, Mobica provided support in continuous improvement (CI), quality assurance (QA) and testing. We designed and implemented a testing framework for running trigger/command voice tests in an acoustic lab, which was also able to detect false-positive cases of voice trigger mechanism in various scenarios – including different language, different noise conditions, etc. We also built automation tools and implemented a multi device fork that could run tests in parallel.
Result
Our customer gained access to a highly skilled team of engineers and, for more than two years, they were able to work in a responsive but structured manner. This deep Mobica expertise helped to successfully bring leading technology to the customer’s market faster.
Our ability to streamline the user interface and implement localisation testing also allowed the customer to shrink long running test times from several days to just a matter of hours.
