Applied Brain Research

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.

Waterloo, ON – September 22, 2026 -- Applied Brain Research (ABR) has released the ABR SDK, a production toolkit combining its Niagara streaming speech recognition and Nith streaming speech synthesis models into a single API that runs entirely on edge processor hardware, eliminating network dependency for voice interfaces.

Niagara ASR generates first text output in as little as 115 milliseconds

The Niagara automatic speech recognition models produce initial text from audio input in 115 milliseconds, measured on embedded application-class CPUs. The Nith text-to-speech models generate first audio output from initial text in 147 milliseconds, with all models operating faster than real time across every supported platform.