Background

Since the first days of telephony, noise became an integral part of communication.  Modern life caused the problem of ambient noise during phone calls to be even more acute than before.  There are several reasons for this, like:

1. Mobility. Today people make calls from almost every location: street, road.. and even from the toilette.

2. Home office. People tend to make many phone calls from their home. Usually the home office suffers from high ambient noise originated from: other people, kids, television, pets, etc.

3. Open space & Call centers. In both cases, phone calls tend to suffer from a noisy environment.

As a result companies invested and keep investing effort in improving the quality by identifying and removing ambient noise from the calls.  There are two main types of solutions for ambient noise reduction: hardware-based and software-based. We have covered these techniques in a previous blog post on ambient noise. In the current post we will concentrate on a unique solution that SoliCall patented – Personalized Noise Reduction.

Personalized Noise Reduction

Personalized noise reduction is a unique technique to remove ambient noise by using registered voice pattern of the user. The technique of registering voice pattern for later use is not new in computer science. For example, there are companies that use the registered voice pattern to  perform biometric identification or to improve speech-to-text translation. SoliCall is the only vendor that uses the technique of resisted voice patterns  to do real-time cleaning of voice calls. This novel concept of using registered patterns for real-time cleaning of voice calls provide very rewarding results. Following is a schematic drawing of the personalized noise reduction approach.

Use Cases

Since the personalized noise reduction  does not require any change to the existing hardware that is currently being used for the call, for example no additional sensors  or microphones need to be added,  the number of uses cases are enormous. In addition, the Personalized Noise Reduction can be performed in any location of the audio path: end devices, routers, PBX etc. Following are few samples of use cases:

1. Call center operators that want to provide higher quality experience to their customers by cancelling the noise that is generated in the call center.

2. Enterprises that want to enable their employees, to make high-quality business calls from noisy environment including form their home office.

3. VoIP service providers that offer hardware-independent telephony service and want to provide their users high quality calls regardless the hardware that they are using in each call.

4. Phone manufactures that want to offer superior noise reduction on top of their existing noise reduction hardware.

How to try  the personalized noise reduction ?

As of today,  SoliCall did not release the professional personalized noise reduction filter as part of its freely available products. Companies that are interested in evaluating this unique technology are invited to contact us.

EDITED: audio samples for the personalized noise reduction software