Dolby, the audio giant known for making your viewing experiences look and sound cinematic, has now set its sights on something that people spend an increasingly large amount of time on: Conference calls. The company’s new tech for laptops, called Dolby Voice, will boost your microphone and speaker performance to help you sound and hear other voices better on calls.
Dolby Voice takes advantage of several of the company’s existing enterprise products to bring them to the wider consumer market. Most importantly, this new tech can automatically cut down on any background noise or echo that may be hampering your voice quality — irrespective of the audio hardware you’re on.
On top of that, Dolby Voice can dynamically balance your sound levels. This means that for people who are quieter or far away from the mic, it can automatically equalize the audio and make it easier for everyone to hear otherwise low-volume speakers. Similarly, even on a particularly chaotic and crowded call, Dolby Voice is capable of separating and equalizing all the individual voices, thereby making conversation easier and more natural.
It’s also worth noting that Dolby Voice improves audio for you in both input and output channels. Therefore, in addition to allowing you to listen better, other participants on the call will hear you more clearly, regardless of whether their machines have Dolby Voice.
Most of Dolby Voice’s features will be available out of the box on compatible laptops and work across a broad range of teleconferencing services. However, the voice separation will only function on conferencing platforms that have been optimized for stereo audio, like Zoom.
Dolby Voice couldn’t come at a better time. As people increasingly rely on online voice and video calls for both work and personal communications, there’s been an urgent need for software and hardware to improve a digital aspect that many didn’t even think of before: Audio. Services like Krisp, which promise to reduce background noise on your calls, have witnessed a sharp uptick during the pandemic.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Dolby is debuting its Voice software tech on Lenovo’s latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga notebooks. We’ve reached out to Dolby to inquire about its plans to support more PC makers and laptops in the future and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
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