Even though mobile phones have become an important, even necessary, part of people’s lives, their main function, making phone calls, often suffers due to poor audio quality. DSP Soundware is trying to change that with two new products: Acoustic Beamforming and Dereverberation.

“We need to overcome background noise, room reverberation, far end echo, and signal cutoff that can occur when both parties speak at the same time,” DSP Soundware president Scott Kurtz (News - Alert) said. “Once we do that, users can spend less effort struggling to understand the words being spoken and instead comfortably enjoy the conversation.”

Acoustic Beamforming involves using two or more microphones, one picking up the voice and the other ones picking up ambient sounds. The idea is to filter out the unwanted noises, leaving only the caller’s voice. DSP Soundware says that this process is similar to human hearing.

Dereverberation, as the name suggests, attempts to get rid of room reverberation from calls, making them easier to understand. This reverberation typically comes when a caller stands away from a microphone instead of talking directly into it.

The two main problems for audio quality in mobile phones stem from the thing that makes them so popular in the first place: their portability. These devices have smaller microphones than the kind in traditional wired handsets, which limits their ability to pick up sounds. Since people make calls in noisier environments than they would with land line phones, it really shows the limitations of mobile phones in terms of voice quality.

The problems with sound quality might account for the popularity of SMS and mobile Internet on mobile devices. Carriers are trying to fight back with initiatives such as HD Voice, but HD Voice still only works with certain LTE (News - Alert) devices and still doesn’t solve the problem of inadequate microphones.

Solutions like DSP Soundware’s could work with existing phones via software. Carriers and phone makers could use these tools and bring customers back to voice and away from over-the-top (OTT) services.