Personalized Noise Reduction in Telephony

Background

Since the first days of telephony, noise became an integral part of communication.  Modern life caused the problem of ambient noise during phone calls to be even more acute than before.  There are several reasons for this, like:

1. Mobility. Today people make calls from almost every location: street, road.. and even from the toilette.

2. Home office. People tend to make many phone calls from their home. Usually the home office suffers from high ambient noise originated from: other people, kids, television, pets, etc.

3. Open space & Call centers. In both cases, phone calls tend to suffer from a noisy environment.

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Echo Cancellation, Art or Science? Part IV

Background

In the previous posts of this series we discussed the challenges of echo cancellation algorithms to efficiently handle the echo path,  the complexity introduced by  echo invalidation and the howling effect. In this post we will discuss another important aspect with regards to echo cancellation called Saturation.

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Why Echo Cancellation for Android is a Difficult Task?

Background

SoliCall offers different software solutions for audio quality improvements. One of the areas with an increasing demand is the need to solve echo issues with Android devices.  As discussed in few of our previous posts on echo cancellation, in real-life conditions performing a good echo cancellation is a rather complex task. In addition, it turns out that for Android devices this task is even harder. In this post we will review the main reasons and alternative solutions.

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Posted in Acoustic Echo Cancellation, AEC, Android, Echo Cancellation, Mobile, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Tips for Installing PBXMate in a Distributed VoIP Network

Background

Many VoIP network administrator face a common problem that their users complain about the quality of their phone calls. The most common complains are about noise, echo and other artifacts.

If the network is distributed, it becomes very difficult to analyze and control the multiple components in the network starting from the end devices (phones/computers) moving to the network components (Cables/Wiring/Gateways), and ending with the centralized units (PBX/ Media Device/Conference Bridge).

The PBXMate is popular software that is used to help monitoring the network and actively resolve quality issues regardless the cause of the problem.

In this post we will review few practical tips for PBXMate installation in a distributed network.

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Posted in Acoustic Echo Cancellation, Audio Quality, Echo Cancellation, Network echo cancellation, SIP, Uncategorized, VoIP | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Audio Quality in Video Conferences

Background

In the last couple of years the percentages of employees that work from home rapidly increases. There are three main reasons for this phenomenon: (1) Efficiency. No need to spend hours driving to/from the office and in many cases the amount of interrupts while at home is lower than at the office. (2) Cost. When the employees work from home the infrastructure/office cost for the company are dramatically reduced. (3) Technology. This is the key enabler for this phenomenon. In the last years robust communication lines and tools have evolved that enable to seamlessly bridge the geographic gap between the physical office and the virtual work place.

In this post we will cover the technology area.

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Flash Conference with Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Background

Following our previous post on acoustic echo cancellation on flash calls, we got requests to improve audio quality also on conference calls that are based on flash technology. The case study that was described in the previous post dealt with audio quality for regular flash calls, and showed how to convert them to SIP in order to improve their quality. In this post we will show you how to utilize the great tools that exists in the SIP world in order to implement conference systems for flash-based calls.

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Posted in Acoustic Echo Cancellation, Audio Quality, Conference Room, Elastix, Flash, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Installing PBXMate with Elastix – Phone Setup

 

Background

In a previous post we reviewed the basics of installing of PBXMate with Elastix. In this post we will review how to configure your phones to work with PBXMate. This post will discuss the configuration for VoIP phones.  In a future post we will review the configuration required for analogue phones.

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Posted in Audio Quality, Elastix, SIP, Sip Proxy, Uncategorized, VoIP | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Intercoms and Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Background

One of the disturbing problems that appears when using intercoms, or other low-end full-duplex communication devices, is the generated echo.  Usually the echo is significant in these situations due to the following two reasons:

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Posted in Acoustic Echo Cancellation, AEC, Echo Cancellation, Network echo cancellation, Noise Cancellation, server-side echo cancellation | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Installing PBXMate with Elastix

Background

As recently announced, the PBXMate is now an Addon to Elastix. As a result, installing PBXMate with Elastix became a very simple and straight forward task. In this post we will perform this task step-by-step. Continue reading

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Echo Cancellation with Flash – A Case Study

Background

From time to time we are getting requests to improve audio quality in flash calls and mainly to help remove echo. In a previous post, from 2011, we discussed few techniques that could be helpful. In this post we show a case study for integrating a centralized audio filtering to improve audio quality and perform server side echo cancellation. The ingredients for this solution combine several off-the-shelf products that integrate together using standard interfaces.

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Posted in Acoustic Echo Cancellation, AEC, Audio Quality, Echo Cancellation, Elastix, Flash, Flashphoner, Network echo cancellation, server-side echo cancellation, Voice Quality, Wowza | Tagged , , | Leave a comment