Shadowing Practice: Embedded Insiders: Qualcomm's Acquisition of Arduino - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Hello friends, engineers and developers all welcome to another segment here on embedded insiders.

I am Ken Briota.

I'm the editor in chief embedded computing design and your host today.

And I'm so happy to be here with Marcello Majancchi of Arduino and now Qualcomm.

Welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Really, really happy to be here with you.

So happy to be here and to get a chance to chat today.

So, you know, our audience of engineers

and developers the first thing they're going to want to know

is are they still going to be able to build

and hobby and work with arduino they all love arduino tell us about the things

that are going to be continuing under the new uh the

new organization well you know i'm happy to report right

that uh you know in almost a year right after acquisition

things are you know really going well in the sense

that we really keep not only the same pace of innovation that we used to keep before the acquisition, but we're actually moving faster and bigger

because not only we continue to work on the same technologies

that we used to work before

and we kept a pace of release of products not based on quality technology

and we are continuing to release these type of products.

But on top of that, we're, of course, releasing quite exciting new products based on Qualcomm technology.

However, with the same spirit, namely the same licenses that we used before.

Just to give you a couple of examples, the last two major products on Qualcomm technology that released, of course, the Arduino UnoQ and Arduino App Lab,

which is the developer environment for for the Arduino Uno Q.

The hardware was released with the same Creative Commons license that we use for any other Arduino board.

And AppLab and all its components have been released on GitHub source code with the same GPL-free licenses that we've been using.

So it's more of the same, if you will, but it's the good same, right?

It's the good stuff.

So we're really happy about it.

Absolutely.

You know, there was a lot of mixed emotions when folks started hearing about the acquisition,

because as you know, Arduino is a beloved company.

Everybody loves an Arduino board.

And, you know, sometimes in an acquisition by a larger entity, things change about culture or product or,

you know, there are mandates from on high that didn't exist before.

And folks were a little bit worried about that.

And so I'd like to assuage, if possible, or report to people if there's changes that they should expect.

So can we talk a little bit about just the transition

and how it's been going and what the experience has been like for the Arduino team?

So let's start with what's been, how has it been feeling?

How has it been going for this integration?

Well, you know, I'm coming up just looking, I'm in my office here in Torino, right, which is the Arduino quarter.

And I, you know, literally, I'm looking, I have a big window.

And, you know, there is a lot of the Arduino team, the product team, and, you know, a bunch of engineers and content creators here.

And I'm just looking over, and things are surprisingly similar to what, you know, they used to be before the acquisition, right?

There is, you know, literally, I can see any Qualcomm logo here, just Arduino logos, like the one that, you know, behind.

And, you know, jokes aside, Arduino is to this day an independent subsidiary, right?

So we kept our independence and also a mandate to just do what we do best,

which is talk to developers, be developers, and really think about the products that first and foremost, we would love to use ourselves right?

And this has been the spirit.

This has been the approach that hopefully translated into the culture

that as leadership we're able to share with the rest of the team.

And so the mood is great.

The feeling is that we get to play with very cool technology.

Now, maybe one of the things that actually have changed, right?

We have a bunch of developer kits that we didn't have before, with very cool and fancy new chipsets and so on that we get to play with.

So from that standpoint, it's actually really cool.

But other than that, same openness,

same developer first mindset, because we are a developer ourselves,

and same real goal to build something that can be shared with the community

and is something that is not just pushed there

and then forgotten about is just something that is meant to be shared so that people can work on it, open the hood, see how it's done,

contribute to it and amplify the overall spirit on top of the technology itself.

Yeah.

And that's incredible to hear.

I mean, that's the, I could obviously see that there were, that things were continuing and you guys were still innovating and stuff,

but to hear it directly from you feels really good.

You mentioned changes, obviously changes come.

What are some of the changes you've been experiencing or that you're expecting?

I mean, And obviously you've got access to a lot of stuff at Qualcomm that you didn't have before.

But other than that, what other changes have you been experiencing?

Well, you know, from a personal standpoint, right, I get to travel to San Diego way more often than I used to, which is not necessarily a bad thing, given that there are more places to be traveling to.

But again, jokes aside, right, I would say that the main change is, of course, access to technology.

Of course, historically, Arduino has collaborated very closely with a lot of different silicon manufacturers.

And that was kind of an internal joke, that despite being a very small company, every single one of the big guys wanted to work with us.

And we are continuing to do that, and we are still working with all the other kind of new big names.

But of course, we have this really kind of unfiltered access to one of them,

which is Qualcomm, so that we really get not just you know, to use preview products like we used to from the others,

but really kind of contribute back to improve these products, right?

By providing our feedback.

We are kind of, you know, in a way also not just a subsidiary of Qualcomm, but also consider sort of a customer zero, if you will.

Yeah, just a test case for new things.

A test case.

If it works for us, right?

Because, you know, we're also similar to our community, very vocal, right?

And we say what we like, but also what we don't like.

and our feedback is really taking into account.

And this is, you know, it feels very good.

It feels, you know, more than anything, like a very good collaboration.

And maybe because it started so, right?

We started first collaborating on building products together

and then we started the discussion about acquisitions and it's really continuing with the same spirit.

Just to, you know, I'm quoting back, right, Nacul Dugal, which is the GM and EVP for IoT and industrial and automotive,

which is our reference leader, if you will, before Cristiano, the CEO, that from a Qualcomm perspective,

the goal of the acquisition has always been to try

and make Qualcomm look a little bit more like Arduino and not the opposite, right?

I think that he said that when we actually did the event, when we announced the acquisition, but it really feels that way, right?

And I think that it's actually a very good signal.

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Yeah, and I've reported on Qualcomm for a long time.

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I think if Qualcomm ends up looking a little more like Arduino, that's all to the good.

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So I think that's fun and a great mission to have and a great direction for this to go in.

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So enough about the past and where we are now.

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Tell me about the future.

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Where, I mean, it is probably undeniable to say that Arduino now has resources within reach that you have not had before.

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You have scale within reach that you have not had before.

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So what are you planning to do that you've not done before?

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Well, you see, let me take a step right.

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And this is the way that I explain the history of Arduino.

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So this year, Arduino celebrated its 21st year of...

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Really?

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Right.

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It feels like yesterday, but we are...

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I'll have to buy you a drink, I guess.

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Absolutely.

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I was about to say the same.

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So in the last 21 years, I like to identify three different phases in the history of the company.

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There is the original phase from the early days incubated within the design institute in Everea,

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where really the mission of Arduino was, or the goal of Arduino was to democratize electronics.

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Then there was a second wave, I would say in the mid 2010s,

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where really the focus shifted more towards IoT and democratization of the edge coding and connectivity.

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Right.

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And now I would say that with the acquisition, we are really, we have moved into the third phase of the list of Arduino,

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which is all about democratizing AI, especially on the edge.

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You see, I kind of see a lot of similarities in what is happening in the market.

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Of course, nothing to do from a technology perspective, right?

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But the point is that in the same way that in the early 2000s,

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there was an opportunity for a lot of creative people to transform products into intelligent products and connected products.

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What they needed was a platform and an approach

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that would provide all the tools in a way that was accessible to them.

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The same is happening today with AI.

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There are a lot of people that have amazing ideas for new smart products and AI products, but AI is too damn hard.

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You need multiple PhDs in order to really master that technology.

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And it doesn't have to be that way.

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I would argue that no one has mastered it yet.

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So, yeah, I agree.

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And so given that the common thread throughout all the 21 years of Arduino history was

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that our mission is to take complex technology and make them simple to use.

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The complex technology these days, in this day and age that is really meant to be simple to use is AI.

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And this is the goal.

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And this is really ultimately the North Star that is guiding all the new initiatives that we are doing.

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The way that I like to call it is that we live in a world that arguably has millions of AI users.

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We want to turn them into millions of AI builders, people that integrate AI in what they do, not just use AI as mere consumers of it.

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Right.

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Interesting.

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I like that philosophy.

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I'm a little bit of a, within parameters, AI poo-pooer poor.

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You know, I don't see a lot of value in an LLM.

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I don't see, you know, beyond being a toy or whatever.

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They've all, everyone listening has heard me make this rant before.

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But I do see a lot of value in the sort of purpose-built, small model, custom, not proprietary necessarily,

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but like built on the data of the thing it's going to be working on, kind of AI.

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And I think that Artuino is an incredible place to be working on

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that kind of an AI tool because you guys are so good at that sort of compact,

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easy to use, edge native kind of thing that everyone's looking for in AI.

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So that's really cool to me.

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I love to hear that that's where your focus is at the moment.

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Absolutely.

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And this, of course, translates into the products that we're working on.

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And of course, last year in November, contextually to the acquisition, we announced the Arduino 1Q, which is the first outcome of the collaboration,

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Arduino App Lab, which is the new generation of developer tools.

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But now we are really getting into the last mile of the ultimate product,

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which is already in previewed at Embedded World a few months back, which is the Arduino VentunoQ,

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which is really bringing AI on the desks of anybody, right?

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Because with VentunoQ, we are really focusing on bringing down the access barrier,

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whether it is cost or complexity for people

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that want to kind of have AI at the edge available for them to experiment, to learn, and to build great things.

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And it's a combination of accessible hardware and accessible software developer tools.

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So you will see just literally we are a few weeks away from when we start opening sales for the Ventuno Q.

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You will see that there is probably no other product with the same capability at that price point in the market.

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And also, So none of the other products have such a comprehensive support from a software perspective and developer experience perspective,

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ranging from ultimate abstraction with Arduino Uplab that really gains AI capabilities,

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all the way to the standard tools that you can use for any other AI technology, right?

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So that you are not constrained, but if you want, there is an epipath

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that will get you to a level of refinement of the final application that would not be possible without this new approach.

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All sprinkled with actually AI tooling in itself, because it's not just about integrating AI, but also using AI to do that.

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And so you will see that we will be introducing new features in AppLab, such as the integration with agentic coders,

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so that you will be able to really orchestrate your development experience through cloud code, codex, so on and so forth,

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because this is the type of workflow that developers are expecting.

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But the idea is not to disintermediate the developer,

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but to provide abstraction without obfuscation so that these type of technologies would be not just easier to use,

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but also faster and more proficient for them to use in order to integrate into their products.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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You know I saw Hank Green do a talk about.

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AI and especially code for code tools,

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whether it be helping write code or helping authorize or debug or whatever as a substrate technology,

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a thing that's sort of like going to explode and become ubiquitous.

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And I find that very interesting.

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And I find the thinking about that from folks like you

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and other folks that I've talked to in not that it's going to replace human coders,

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but that it's going to make them able to create more interesting,

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more varied, and more mass of code at a greater scale.

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So that's an interesting idea.

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Absolutely.

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You see, if you put AI in the hands of someone that knows what they are doing,

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the quality of the output is going to be massively better.

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At the same time, AI is also enabling people

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that not be able to do it without it to be able to get somewhere, right?

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Instead of nowhere.

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You also have to consider that differently from AI in the cloud,

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which is the most common place where AI runs these days, AI on the edge adds a new level,

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another layer of complexity, which is the fact that is constrained into a physical form factor where compute is not infinite,

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but it has a limit.

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And also something that is physically constrained, which means that in order to be as effective as you can,

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AI and your tooling needs to have some degree of awareness about the physical condition of your setup.

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It's not as ethereal as the cloud, but it needs to kind of understand exactly what it's dealing with, especially if you have peripherals and so on.

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And so one of the innovations that we're introducing in our App Lab tool chain is really kind of MCP servers,

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not much to tell AI what that processor is capable, you know, processor is capable, but what that system is actually,

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you know, able to do, right?

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What are the peripherals?

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What are the constraints?

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You know, what are, you know, the things that can be connected in terms of sensor actuator and so on?

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So that, you know, when you build your application, you will, your AI will be able to understand exactly what are the condition, right?

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What is the perimeter of action in order to be as efficient as it can be?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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I think we're at an interesting inflection point in the world with respect to this stuff.

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And I'm glad to see that Arduino has at least its hands on the reins.

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um now uh the last question that i'd love to ask you is a question

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that i love to ask everybody because it uh it i can't know everything

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which means i can't always know what to ask

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so what i'll ask you is what didn't i think to ask you

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that the folks out there listening our engineers

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and developers really ought to know about arduino where you're going

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maybe about the qualcomm acquisition maybe about something else what do

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you think they should know in this moment about what you guys are doing?

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I think that we briefly touched at the beginning, but it's something that is so important to me, to Arduino, but also to the community that is worth double clicking on it.

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And the question is, will Arduino keep doing stuff outside of the Qualcomm technology?

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And the answer is a resound yes.

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Because Qualcomm does a lot of very cool things, but there are areas where simply it doesn't have products,

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it doesn't have technologies, but also where there are also other technologies

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that we love and we think that there is an added value for the community itself.

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So you will see starting for the coming months, steady streams of new products that will have no Qualcomm technology in it

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or very little Qualcomm technology that maybe not be even core.

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So we will continue to feed right into the same streams that we've been doing in the past,

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but also adding all these new form factors and these new products,

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opening up new opportunities for developers for building really cool things.

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And why not?

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Also to experiment by assembling together different products.

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I've actually seen some projects that are combining UnoQs and legacy UnoR3s and UnoR4s,

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creating very interesting you know, setups and projects.

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And so why not?

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We are always amazed and surprised by the creativity of our community.

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And, you know, I'm actually looking forward to see what they will be able to invent.

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I wasn't expecting at each new product release that we do.

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Absolutely.

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Well, thank you so much, Margello, for taking the time to chat with me today.

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This was great.

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And I'm sure there's going to be a lot to see from Arduino over the next months and years.

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So we'll be in touch again.

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I absolutely know it.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 250 sentences and 3235 words to shadow. The speech runs for 21:00. The speaker talks at a natural 154 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
developer noun	/dɪˈvɛləpɚ/	A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products.
acquisition noun	/ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/	The act or process of acquiring.
folk noun	/foʊk/	People, persons.
cloud noun	/ˈklaʊ̯d/	A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air.
accessible adjective	/əkˈsɛs.ɪ.bəl/	Easy of access or approach.
integrate verb	/ˈɪn.tɪ.ɡɹeɪt/	To include as a constituent part or functionality.
necessarily adverb	/ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/	Inevitably; of necessity.
connect verb	/kəˈnɛkt/	To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object.
experiment noun	/ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/	A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of…
pace noun	/peɪs/	A step taken with the foot.
introduce verb	/ˌɪntɹəˈdus/	To cause (someone) to be acquainted (with someone else).
contribute verb	/kənˈtɹɪb.jut/	To give something that is or becomes part of a larger whole.
feedback noun	/ˈfiːdˌbæk/	Critical assessment of a process or activity or of their results.
innovation noun	/ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/	The act of innovating; the introduction of something new, in customs, rites, etc.
hardware noun	/ˈhɑɹdˌwɛɹ/	Fixtures, equipment, fasteners, tools, and devices used for general-purpose construction and repair of a structure or object. Also such equipment as sold as…

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
bring down verb	To make (a ruler or government) lose their position of power.
come up verb	To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly.
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
look forward to verb	To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to.
look over verb	To check quickly; to make a brief or cursory visual inspection of.
open up verb	To open.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	we've been using · it's been going · has it been going
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to keep · used to work · used to be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have been released · has been · what's been
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was released · have been released · can be shared

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 50 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, we're, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: thread /ˈθɹɛd/, authorize /ˈɔθəɹaɪz/, ethereal /ɪˈθɪɚ.i.əl/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, collaboration /kəˌlæbəˈɹeɪʃən/, integration /ˌɪn.tɪˈɡɹeɪ.ʃən/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/
Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/, accessible /əkˈsɛs.ɪ.bəl/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like developer, acquisition, folk.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Embedded Insiders: Qualcomm's Acquisition of Arduino - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?