ABR Ships On-Device Speech AI SDK for Alif Ensemble on Zephyr
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WATERLOO – November 02, 2026 -- Applied Brain Research (ABR) has made its speech AI software development kit generally available on Zephyr RTOS for Alif Semiconductor's Ensemble family of edge AI processors. On the Ensemble E8, its Niagara ASR engine delivers 133 ms average latency from first audio to first token while drawing 15 mW of active power above baseline.
SDK bundles streaming recognition and synthesis that run without a cloud connection
The kit combines two engines. Niagara ASR provides full-vocabulary streaming speech recognition with low latency, transcribing speech continuously as it is spoken. Nith TTS provides low-latency streaming speech synthesis.
The SDK also offers native Zephyr RTOS support for battery-powered and air-gapped products, plus ongoing model updates and expansion.