We're fans over here at Crank of the Electronic Engineering Journal (EE Journal) so we jumped at the chance to be interviewed by Amelia Dalton on her Weekly Fish Fry podcast. In this week's episode, Jason Clarke, VP Sales & Marketing chatted with Amelia about the trends in embedded user interfaces (UIs), and challenges that teams typically face when it comes to the design and development of their device graphics, and how Crank came to be.

Click to listen to the podcast or read the transcript underneath.

Voice recognition technology continues to grow in both capacity and popularity. The original technology was rather primitive – you may remember struggling with it while attempting to navigate a business’s automated attendant trying to perform even the simplest tasks. Thanks to enhancements in speech recognition technologies and cloud-driven digital assistants from big players like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, the state-of-the-art has come a long way. The current word error rate of a voice recognition engine is around five percent, which at this point is very nearly what humans achieve (four percent). We have made huge strides: by comparison, the lowest error rate 20 years ago for unconstrained speech was 43 percent. Highly stilted grammars are also a thing of the past; instead, we communicate with our devices using natural flowing speech.

Understanding and accounting for the different memory requirements of your embedded graphics application is critical. Your choice of system-level memory (heap, stack, static code), and hardware level can not only impact graphics performance, but also compromise the user experience, and thus market success of your embedded UI.

In this first of two videos on memory optimization that streamed live on the Crank YouTube channel on 6 May 2020, Thomas Fletcher, Crank Software's Co-Founder and VP R&D, talked about the different memory optimization options available for those building on MCUs and MPUs, and how to organize memory use for highest performance. You can watch the replay by clicking the video, or read the transcript pasted below.

Embedded systems and UI development can be complicated. Factor in social distancing and teams being forced to continue development remotely, and the situation has become even more complex. But it doesn’t have to be! 

Thomas Fletcher, Co-Founder and VP of R&D, talks about the UI development tools our clients and own team are leveraging today to connect remotely and keep embedded projects moving forward, in this edition of Embedded UI Talks with Crank. 

Hear about our newest feature update for the Storyboard IO Connector and its support for TCP/IP, and how you can leverage it to inject events over a network, effectively decoupling the need for the UI and back-end to be physically deployed in the same location.

There are fundamental differences in developing embedded UI applications for MCUs and MPUs. But as MCU performance and functionality continue to improve, the boundaries between the two have started to become murky. 

Thomas Fletcher, Co-Founder and VP of R&D, explores the changing landscape in MCU versus MPU capabilities and what you need to consider when evaluating your next embedded project’s hardware options, in this live edition of Embedded UI Talks with Crank.