Audience launches software that improves PC speech quality and voice recognition

Audience, a maker of voice-processing chips for mobile phones, is launching its first stand-alone software to improve voice recognition and speech quality on PCs, tablets, and all-in-one computers.

The Audience S1.0 software uses similar advanced voice-processing technologies that the company uses in its audio chips.

"The PC market is changing a lot, and we're seeing growth opportunities for the first time," said Eric Skup, vice president of software products at Audience in Mountain View, Calif., in an interview with VentureBeat. "What is driving that growth are new form factors (like hybrid tablet-laptops). Voice and speech are becoming more important, with audio conferences and speech user interfaces."

But to deliver better speech applications, the computer has to get better at recognizing voices, words, or background noise. That's the kind of thing that Audience's technology has become good at.

With the Audience S1.0 software, your computer will become better at running VoIP (voice over IP), such as Skype calls. It will also be better at recognizing voice commands and other voice-controlled applications.

Audience has technology that suppresses background noise so that you can be heard better in noisy environments such as coffee shops. You can also hear the other person better, even if that person is in a noisy place, Skup said. He also said that Audience software will remove keyboard sounds from the audio.

Audience is also introducing a couple of new voice-processing chips today.

Audience has been working since 2000 on technology to reproduce the way the human ear perceives sound. It has taken that knowledge and put it into computer models that are embedded inside its chips. Those chips can reproduce sound so you can hear it in your mobile calls. They can make garbled voice calls sound better, which is more important as mobile networks become clogged with voice and data. The Audience chips are already used in 320 mobile devices, and Audience has shipped 450 million voice-processor chips to date.

Audience was founded by Lloyd Watts, a researcher who worked with legendary brain and computer chip expert Carver Mead. Watts worked on audio technology at Paul Allen’s think tank, Interval Research, but that shut down in 2000. Allen’s Vulcan Ventures invested in Audience, and Mead joined Audience’s board for a time. The company got its first real capital in 2004 and started selling chips. It went public in May 2012.