April 4th, 2007
Yammering kids in background? SoliCall filters out noises on VoIP calls
Shlomi Simhi, who is director of marketing for Israel-based SoliCall Ltd., writes to brush me up on a new SoliCall real-time SoliCall software package that reduces background noises during IP calls, based on personalized algorithms.
Secret sauce, according to the company:
SoliCall is designated to reduce noises that do not belong to the primary speaker. The default mode is "Anybody" which means that SoliCall will transmit all human sounds, and so it will narrow its focus on reducing other background noises (e.g., the ticking noise of your keyboard, running water, car horn).
You can enhance the capabilities of SoliCall by registering a specific speaker. For that you will need to record a sample of your voice. This gives SoliCall the ability to learn and analyze the acoustic parameters of the speaker's voice and to minimize other noises during the call. At a lower scale, the incoming audio can also be screened ("Screen Incoming Enabled"). In this case, the result will depend on the original quality of the incoming audio.
The company's Web site has provided a link to a demo. Because the demo is, as Shlomi says, provided mainly for the media, I won't link to it. That said, the link to the demo is plain as day on the SoliCall site's landing page.
Results of the demo for a three-party conference call are at the top of this post. The first half of this call was conducted without benefit of SoliCall's noise reduction algos, the second half with.
An analysis of what SoliCall terms a "Family" call immediately follows after this paragraph. Same breakdown: first half, no noise reducer, second half, yes. And for both halves, kids were yammering away in the background. Sounds like some of your calls?
And as to that lower frame, consider the kids filtered out. Heh.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
