Red Cat equipping Teal Drones with AI-enhanced voice-control capabilities

Specialized defense and security UAV company Red Cat Holdings is moving to further enhance the onboard assets of its tactical Teal Drones craft by adding voice-control capacities developed by startup Primordial Labs.

Red Cat said it has struck a partnership with Primordial Lab to integrate the Connecticut-based company’s voice-control tech into the Teal Drones it supplies to a growing number of US defense and security agencies. The application allows UAV operators to simply speak commands for the craft to execute, much the way consumers vocally direct iPhones and smart TVs, or try to get Alexa or Siri to repeat obscenities. 

The move has already set Red Cat working with Primordial to incorporate Teal 2 reconnaissance drones with the voice-control capabilities of the startup’s Anura tech. 

In addition to various add-on advantages the artificial intelligence-enhanced application will enable, equipping Teal drones with Anura will give military pilots an obvious and immediate advantage: maintaining nearly unbroken visual contact with their craft, and looking down at tablets or other control devices only for coordinate or other data information.

“Adding voice control into our products is another step toward our goal of building the best-in-class rucksack portable drone,” said Teal Drones chief technology officer George Matus. “The flexibility provided by voice control, combined with the existing features in our offering, will continue to push Teal’s drones into a leadership position. We are proud to partner with Primordial Labs, an innovator in the human-machine teaming space, through which we will bring even more capability to the tactical edge.”

The immediate consequence of incorporating Primodial voice capabilities will be enabling Teal Drone operators to use natural language to command and control autonomous actions for single and swarms of Red Cat UAVs. Over time, the machine-learning and predictive capacities of internal AI will allow for faster and improved navigation and response to rapidly-evolving scenarios users face.

It will also strengthen the array of onboard assets Teal Drones are equipped with. Those include tech by Tomahawk Robotics, Athena AI, Teledyne FLIR, Reveal Technology, Immervision, and Doodle Labs, which enable computer vision, AI, and third-party app capabilities.