Creative Showcases Video Messaging Camera

By Digital Trends Staff May 24, 2006

Creative Technology last week unveiled a new web camera with enhanced voice clarity and noise reduction technologies for video instant messaging. The new Live! Cam Voice is priced at $99.99 and should be available this month.

The Live! Cam Voice, said Creative, integrates dual adaptive array microphones to capture the user’s voice while reportedly eliminating background and environmental noise coming from outside the webcam’s field of view. The camera has 1.3 megapixel resolution for photo and video capture and users can snap still photos up to 5.0 megapixels. It also incorporates video technology to maximize the number of frames that are displayed per second so that it can reportedly deliver a better picture.

“Noisy coffee shops, airports and offices are no longer an unacceptable environment for video instant messaging- the Live! Cam Voice blocks out all the distracting conversations and noise around you so you can clearly communicate wherever you are” said Dr. Jeff Stoen, general manager for cameras at Creative, in a statement. “The Live! Cam Voice features innovative dual array microphones, so even when you’re in public, you can have private conversations that sound as clear as a phone call.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Emerging Tech

Digital Trends Staff

Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…

Emerging Tech

Alexa and Siri can’t understand the tone of your voice, but Oto can

oto voice intonation ai call center mouthpiece

Speech-recognition technology is everywhere these days, most notably in A.I. smart assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google's Assistant. But as anyone who has ever had a conversation IRL (in real life) will know, speech isn’t just about the words that a person says, but the tone of voice in which they say them. It’s one reason that text-based conversations online can be such a nightmare, since the basic words themselves don’t allow for sufficient nuance to always convey a person’s meaning.

One exciting startup looking to inject more understanding into speech recognition is Oto, a spinoff from the prestigious SRI International, which helped spawn Siri more than a decade ago. Oto is working on voice-intonation technology that will, at least initially, enable call centers to better understand the vocal emotions of callers and sales agents alike.

News

Google is monitoring animal populations with a giant network of wildlife cameras

Using AI to find where the wild things are

Wildlife Insights: Saving Biodiversity with Tech and AI

A new artificial intelligence program led by Google and Conservation International streamlines wildlife conservation monitoring to better protect animals.

Emerging Tech

Inside the weird, wild, and wondrous world of quantum video games

quantum computing video games ibm q research 6

In 1950, a man named John Bennett, an Australian employee of the now-defunct British technology firm Ferranti, created what may be history’s first gaming computer. It could play a game called Nim, a long-forgotten parlor game in which players take turns removing matches from several piles. The player who loses is the one who removes the last match. For his computerized version, Bennett created a vast machine 12 feet wide, 5 feet tall, and 9 feet deep. The majority of this space was taken up by light-up vacuum tubes which depicted the virtual matches.

Bennett’s aim wasn’t to create a game-playing machine for the sake of it; the reason that somebody might build a games PC today. As writer Tristan Donovan observed in Replay, his superlative 2010 history of video games: “Despite suggesting Ferranti create a game-playing computer, Bennett’s aim was not to entertain but to show off the ability of computers to do [math].”