EINDHOVEN, The Netherlands, March 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

This year's NXP Software booth at Mobile World Congress 2013 was almost entirely devoted to voice enhancements i.e. features like noise suppression and echo cancellation required to enhance the quality of voice calls. Visitors participated in multiple interactive demos to hear how LifeVibes VoiceExperience delivers increased quality and clarity for wideband audio (HD Voice). Offering best-in-class noise suppression and echo cancellation, LifeVibes VoiceExperience provides a premium consumer experience across all platforms and ecosystems.

     (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130319/601790 )

Listening test

One of the demos was a simple A-B pairwise listening test, in which several competing 2-microphone noise suppression solutions are compared.

The items in the listening test are recordings made from commercially available solutions. The phones under test are the Huawei Ascend D1, the Sony Xperia T, the Apple iPhone5 and two different tunings of LifeVibes VoiceExperience. The listening test is blind, i.e. the booth visitor is presented two audio clips without disclosing to which phone they correspond. Two different noise conditions have been used: babble noise, which contains both stationary and non-stationary components and a music track which is highly non-stationary. The noise is played at two different levels. After having played audio clip A and B, the question for the visitor to answer is simple: "Which one do you prefer?"

After four days of testing at Mobile World Congress, 613 votes have been cast. From these votes, 82 times a visitor indicated "equal". Of the remaining 531 votes, the preference for LifeVibes VoiceExperience was clear.

New voice blog!

NXP Software's noise suppression demonstration gave everyone a chance to hear how noise can be removed while still maintaining quality of speech. This ensures intelligibility in noisy environments such as railway stations or restaurants, including when using speaker mode. NXP Software's voice experts have been developing voice enhancement algorithms for almost a decade now. The recently launched VoiceGurus.com blog will report and comment on interesting activities related to aspects of voice technology for mobile devices.

"We have a lot of technical expertise to share on voice technology for mobile devices," says Ralf Funken, Product Manager Voice at NXP Software. "The VoiceGurus blog will look at the technical challenges of delivering a high quality voice experience on mobile devices. We will share our insights and opinions and want everyone to get involved in the discussion." http://www.voicegurus.com