BARCELONA—Cheap calls may become much clearer thanks to a new chip from Audience, which could bring much better noise-cancellation to inexpensive feature phones.
Audience makes noise cancellation and voice-quality-improvement technology for several of the top smartphone makers including HTC, Pantech, Samsung, and Sony. Its technology may also be built into the iPhone 4S, although the company steadfastly refuses to confirm or deny that.
But up until now, you've needed two microphones, and a few extra dollars, to play Audience's game. That lets the chip sort your own voice out from background noise, as well as do other tricks like enhancing the tones a specific listener can hear or even slowing down speech when it's too fast.
"It's not just noise suppression, it's a whole bunch of technologies," Andy Keane, Audience's Vice President of Marketing said. "If you're in a restaurant and you have this technology, you don't have to talk loudly, for instance."
"There's amazing penetration for these phones. They ship in huge numbers. But the primary problem is poor voice quality; it's terrible. [Manufacturers] aren't paying attention to the primary use case, which is voice; they just get the reference design," Keane said.
Processing sound from just one microphone means "we don't get all the cues from the two mics, but we get enough," he said. The ES110 uses Audience's algorithms to filter out "nonstationary noise," such as the surrounding noises on mass transit, he said.
"If someone's talking right beside you, this will filter out his voice," he said.
Audience's "Siri Mode"
Keane also wanted to talk up Audience's "ASR Assist" mode, which helps phones process voices into forms computers can understand.This sounds to me like the technology widely considered to be built into the iPhone 4S's processor, to help Siri understand what people are saying.
Keane wouldn't confirm this, of course, but later said, "I can't say that it isn't enabled anywhere."
The mode happens to be built into Audience's ES305 chip, which has been appearing in phones since at least November 2011. But the "Siri mode"–that's my phrase, not Keane's–just hasn't been enabled in software on most of those devices. According to Chipworks, the ES305 is in Samsung's Galaxy Note. If more phones want to use electronic voice-recognition systems, firms should consider enabling this feature, Keane said.
"The handset maker can't simply turn it on and off," Keane noted. "We need a carrier spec, and for the OS provider and the speech recognition people to basically say, this is something we should do."
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