BT Conferencing and Dolby Make Conference Calls Sound and Feel Like In-Person Meetings

BT Conferencing has just announced that it is joining Dolby Laboratories in a technology trial designed to make audio conference calls more effective by making them sound and feel like in-person meetings. The goal is to create a spatial audio scene where users can experience consistent volume levels, a natural sense of space, and decreased background noise, enabling all participants to clearly distinguish who is speaking and to understand what is being said. Dolby Voice is a complete client and server software solution that runs on industry-standard hardware, with open APls for integration into existing service-provider back ends. The softclient subsystem supports PC, Mac Linux, iOS, and Android operating systems, and it can also be easily integrated into the broader conferencing client.

Blair Pleasant of UCStrategies, reflecting on a Dolby Voice demo at Enterprise Connect 2012, found that: "[w]ith spatial audio, you can tell where people are located inside a conference room or where the conference is taking place based on where you hear the sound in the headset. You can get an idea of who's on what side of the room, and you can figure out who's talking based on their physical location. And as they move around the room, the audio follows them. As Dolby explains it, they create a unique spatial audio scene for each VoIP participant, which lets the human brain understand what is being said, even when people are talking over each other (often referred to as the cocktail party effect). When multiple people are talking at the same time, you can tune in to individual voices and still hear them clearly, which isn't the case on regular audio conferencing systems. ... The noise reduction was also impressive. There was a lot of noise from the air conditioning, which was pretty loud in the room, but the software was able to block it out of the audio stream and it didn't interfere with the audio."

Dolby Voice Specifications and Features

The core BT MeetMe conferencing service was initially supported by traditional time-division multiplexing (TDM) based audio conferencing bridge equipment. This has been upgraded to a platform based on voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and is a key part of BT's audio and video conferencing solutions. It is also fully integrated into the BT One portfolio of UC solutions, which BT Global Services delivers to global corporations and government organizations.