Alango's front-end voice enhancement technologies have been used in communication products for hard-of-hearing people, mobile phones, hands-free car kits, Bluetooth headsets, audioconferencing systems, voice intercom systems, and many other applications. The company’s DSP software is already embedded in many millions of products currently in the field.
The result of years of development work, Alango VoiceDefender is an advanced voice enhancement signal processing solution, ready to be used by developers and manufacturers in new on-ear and over-ear headphone designs without the need for a boom microphone. VoiceDefender enables noise-free voice communication by eliminating dominant noise sources and focusing on voice and speech signals.
With VoiceDefender Gen2, Alango focused on improving the overall solution for open spaces and the specific challenges of competing voices in close range. Open offices can be noisy, and front-facing chatter from colleagues is especially tough for most headsets to handle — especially when the device being used to capture our own voice doesn't have a boom to place the microphone closer to our mouth. The compromise in that type of design is that the microphone needs to be optimized to deal with capture in close proximity, avoiding distortion caused by very high SPL variations, and requiring dedicated processing to deal with plosives. Those designs close to the mouth and subject to being bombarded with droplets of saliva cause long-term reliability issues - not to mention hygiene.
Another recent challenge faced by product designers and manufacturers in the communications space is that Microsoft Teams Open Office certification is no joke; it demands that headsets cut down distracting voices that originate 70 centimeters directly in front of the user by 15dB - which tacitly meant that designers needed a mic boom. Not anymore!
Conventional beamforming algorithms utilize the difference in arrival time of sounds coming from different directions. The problem is that with a standard microphone configuration with 2 microphones on each side (see Figure 2), there is no difference in the arrival time of the user's voice and the sounds coming from the front. VoiceDefender Gen2 was developed to tackle this head-on, using an innovative microphone array — two microphones on each earcup in a unique topology — and a proprietary algorithm specifically designed to deliver clear voice.
The result is that VoiceDefender Gen2 technology creates a virtual "quiet sphere" around the user, attenuating distracting sounds from all directions and sounding great, even in noisy environments. And the special microphone configuration combined with Alango proprietary software enables meeting Teams Open Office certification standards.
www.alango.com
