Skype for business is a very powerful and popular communication platform and is used by many organizations. Using Skype for business is both a convenient and economic way for collaboration. Skype is used by the employees to communicate both with fellow workers and also with people outside the organization. In this post we would like to discuss the aspect of audio quality in voice calls and specifically noise reduction issues.

Where is the noise coming from?

Voice calls are conducted from many environments some of them are noisy and sometimes even extremely noisy. The ambient noise has a direct impact on the quality of the voice calls. Let’s review some typical environments in which voice calls are made:

• Open office. When a call is made from an open office, the ambient noise can sometimes be very loud. This noise may contain other co-workers talking, phone ringing etc.
• At home. When an employee is making voice calls from home, there might be significant ambient noise like kids or TV playing in the other room, dog barking outside etc.
• On the road. In some cases calls are made on the road. It goes without saying that on the road there is usually a significant ambient noise like street noise, car horn etc.

The experience of having to stop a phone call due to a significant ambient noise is quite common.

Noise reduction technology

In order to attenuate the ambient noise in voice calls, SoliCall developed two innovative and complementary noise reduction technologies:

1. Profile based noise reduction (PNR). This technology attenuates non-human sounds while amplifying the voice of the speaker.

2. Reference based noise reduction (RNR). When hooking a secondary (reference) microphone to the PC, the RNR technology identifies the ambient noise, even if it contains human voices of other people in the background, and attenuates it from the calls.

How does the noise reduction integrate with Skype?

In order to enable seamless integration of our noise reduction technology with Skype, we have wrapped it with an innovate virtual audio device. Once installed on the PC, it creates a new virtual microphone and speaker. Then, all you have to do is to configure Skype to use the new microphone and speaker. Profile based noise reduction (PNR) will immediatly kick in. In order to enable the RNR technology, you should connect a secondary microphone. For more details, take a look at the integration page.

Can I give it a try?

Yes. You can freely try an evaluation version of SoliCall Pro. Please note that in some cases this standalone product is not sufficient and we recommend using SoliCall Connect. If you would like us to assist with selecting the best product and tuning options, feel free to contact us.