With the continuous maturation of smart home technology and the rapid improvement of voice recognition capabilities, the interaction methods of home audio-visual equipment are undergoing profound changes.
Previously, the core operating logic centered on physical buttons is no longer sufficient to meet consumers' core needs for efficient interaction and accurate search in today's highly rich content ecosystem and continuously expanding functional modules.
Therefore, making devices "easier to use," rather than simply piling on "content and functions," has become an important direction for the development of control terminals.
Driven by this trend, voice remote controls equipped with a complete BLE protocol stack are breaking into the mainstream with their more natural, intuitive, and user-friendly voice interaction, becoming the core interactive terminal for devices such as smart TVs and cable set-top boxes.
For consumers, they only need to press the voice button on the Bluetooth voice remote control and speak their desired command, and the smart TV can quickly complete the corresponding operations such as channel switching, content searching, and volume adjustment.
Compared to traditional infrared remote controls, Bluetooth voice remote controls offer a significant improvement in interaction efficiency.
Beyond the core feature of voice interaction, it avoids the directional transmission of infrared remote controls, instead establishing a stable wireless communication link with the receiving terminal via the BLE protocol.
This allows for remote control of the receiving terminal regardless of obstructions or direction, providing consumers with more flexible usage scenarios and smoother interaction.
The BLE voice remote control box solution is simple.
As shown in the diagram above, in actual operation, Bluetooth voice remote controls typically use voice triggering as the starting point for interaction.
When the user presses the voice button, the microphone inside the remote control begins to collect voice signals, and the front-end audio processing circuit completes basic processing such as amplification, noise reduction, and analog-to-digital conversion.
Subsequently, the voice data is initially packaged by the main control chip built into the remote control and transmitted to the main device such as the TV or set-top box in a low-power and low-latency manner through the complete BLE protocol stack.
After receiving voice data, the main device will send it to a local or cloud-based speech recognition and semantic understanding engine for parsing.
This engine will convert the user's natural language commands into specific control commands or content search requests, ultimately driving the system to perform specific operations such as channel switching, application activation, or parameter adjustment.
It's worth noting that with the continuous optimization of voice interaction solutions, the competitive focus of Bluetooth voice remote controls has shifted from "whether or not they have voice functionality" to "how easy or difficult they are to use."
The key to supporting this difference in experience lies hidden within the core wireless communication chip, the BLE SoC, inside the remote control—it not only needs to strike a balance between power consumption, performance, and stability, but also needs to provide sufficient resources for voice data transmission, human-computer interaction response, and subsequent functional expansion.
For example, HOPERF's self-developed CMT4531 is a high-performance BLE SoC designed for low-power human-computer interaction applications.
In terms of voice interaction, the CMT4531 supports analog microphone input and integrates a programmable PGA (up to 128x gain) and adjustable microphone bias, enabling amplification and conditioning of voice signals without the need for an external audio front-end.
Its ADC supports 16-bit/16 kHz PCM voice output and incorporates digital decimation filtering and noise suppression mechanisms, providing a clear and stable voice input foundation for applications such as voice search and voice control, ensuring accurate and rapid voice command transmission.
In terms of wireless connectivity, the CMT4531 integrates a BLE 5.2 compliant RF transceiver, supporting 1 Mbps, 2 Mbps, and 125 kbps/500 kbps long-range modes.
In typical 1 Mbps mode, its receive sensitivity reaches -96 dBm, and its maximum transmit power is +6 dBm, providing ample link headroom for Bluetooth voice remote controls in complex environments such as living rooms and bedrooms.
Even with multiple Bluetooth devices coexisting, signal obstruction, or varying distances, it maintains stable data transmission, ensuring that voice commands are delivered completely and continuously to the host device.
In terms of battery life, the CMT4531's receiving current is only about 3.8 mA @ 3.3 V, and the transmitting current is as low as 4.2 mA at 0 dBm.
The average operating current is only 70 µA during a 100 ms Bluetooth connection interval, and can even be as low as 13 µA in broadcast scenarios (1 s broadcast interval).
Combined with the ultra-low power consumption of about 1.4 µA in Sleep mode (48 KB RAM fully retained) and only 130 nA in PD mode, the battery life of the voice remote control can be greatly improved.
Furthermore, from a product design perspective, the high integration of the CMT4531 brings significant advantages to the hardware solution of Bluetooth voice remote controls.
The chip integrates wireless communication, a processor core, and necessary peripheral resources within a single platform, reducing the number of external components.
This not only lowers the BOM cost but also allows for a thinner and lighter design for the remote control.
If you are interested in HOPERF's independently developed BLE SoC CMT4531 or other BLE chips/modules, please scan the QR code above or copy and open the link at the end of the article to apply for samples. We will be happy to serve you!
