R&D Stories: The Evolution of True Wireless Stereo

Adding a valuable perspective to the topic of True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds and hearables development, Jean-Marc Luneau (7 Sensing Software) details meaningful new features and improvements for brands to differentiate their products and make them stand out in today’s crowded market. This article was originally published in audioXpress April 2021.

Alango VoiceDefender is a new 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 of an ugly boom mic. VoiceDefender enables noise-free voice communication for on-ear/over ear headphones virtually eliminating dominant noise sources and highlighting voice and speech signals, effectively taking augmented audio to a whole new level.

Startup company Duolink Go just launched its first product campaign on Kickstarter with an interesting design concept. Duolink Go debuted the world's first SpeakerBuds all-in-one design, combining true wireless earbuds and a two-part charging case with in-built speakers. The product differentiation is actually smart, since it offers a larger battery and charging case for TWS, which also serves as a single compact Bluetooth portable speaker or a separate (stereo) pair when opened.

This article by Hans W. Gierlich and Jan Reimes - two top experts in communication technologies from HEAD acoustics GmbH - details the expanded effort for understanding speech under noisy conditions, and addresses a new approach recently introduced by HEAD acoustics, resulting in a new model that can be used to test active noise cancellation (ANC) performance in complex scenarios where the system needs to distinguish between speech signals as part of the background noise and speech signals directed toward the users of these devices. This article was originally published in audioXpress, April 2020.

DSP processing software specialist firm, Alango has been working to port the company's Voice Enhancement Package (VEP) to the NXP i.MX RT600 cross-over processor family, which is optimized for 32-bit immersive audio applications combining a high-performance Cadence Tensilica Hi-Fi 4 audio DSP core with a next-generation Cortex-M33 core. VEP is a set of Alango proprietary far-field voice enhancement technologies developed to improve human to machine interaction in a variety of applications.

The first step companies face in enabling a voice user interface (VUI) experience is to decide whether to partner with a current market offering or to build a proprietary voice solution, which requires a significant amount of resources. In this article, Ofer Elyakim (Chief Executive Officer, DSP Group) offers an overview of DSP Group’s experience in enabling voice in a variety of new consumer electronics devices, using its open audio/voice DSP platform. This article was originally published in audioxpress, June 2018.