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Aliph, a Silicon Valley maker of a remarkably effective noise-reducing headset, has been able to do what a lot of companies haven’t in the wireless headset market: Sell something expensive while the competition is selling cheap stuff.

The company has so far sold millions of its Jawbone wireless cell phone ear piece units since launching in 2006, at a hefty price of $120, in a commodity market where cheap ear pieces sell for $40.

It has done so with a unique audio technology that it had been working on since 1999. The Jawbone Bluetooth headset has features enabling its user to hear their calls more clearly, even in noisy environments.

Today, the company is launching its second-generation product. (We were invited to a launch party last night, and picked up the new ear piece to try it out). The price has been increased to $129, but it’s worth it.

The new Jawbone is smaller and has a sleeker design. It’s as thin as your little finger, and it’s simpler to use than the first version — and based on a testing this morning, it’s just as good, if not a tad better, at noise reduction.

Aliph chief executive Hosain Rahman did say the new headset has better noise elimination. It’s also meant to fit better on most ears, and Matt can confirm that it does have an easier, snug fit. Both of us bought and used the first generation Jawbone, and found it remarkably good at reducing noise. Matt tried out this second version. He turned on the microwave and called a friend while standing right next to it; his friend’s voice crackled for the first few seconds, but became much clearer and clearly audible thereafter. The friend could hear him fine, with almost no noise in the background. On the other end, she ground some coffee beans next to her phone. Even though she had no jawbone, Matt’s Jawbone kicked in and the noise was sharply reduced after about three seconds.

It now has a leather-covered hook for the ear instead of a plastic one (a good thing because the plastic broke off on one that Dean used) and it is 50 percent smaller. Matt’s first Jawbone broke when he tried pulling off the power socket, in part because the first version’s design was too delicate; the second Jawbone feels more robust, and the power socket fits on easier.

The Jawbone features a patented design where a small plastic nub rests on the cheek of the user. It records the vibrations and movements from the user’s jawbone and uses that data to determine what the person is saying. It then uses an audio processor to filter out background noise. Aliph calls this the Jawbone Noise Assassin, a technology originally developed by the Department of Defense’s DARPA agency for battlefield use. The Jawbone also raises the volume of the headset whenever the user is in a noisy place. The company claims it eliminates 10 times as much noise as rival headsets.

The new Jawbone goes on sale at AT&T stores around the country. Bluetooth headets are expected to top 120 million units sold in 2009, partly because some states such as California will require that drivers use such headsets when using cell phones in a car.

Aliph is based on San Francisco and has been funded by Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. It competes with other audio technology companies such as Audience, which recently raised a $15 million round for its audio processing chips.

The new Jawbone weighs 10 grams, has four hours of talk time on a battery charge, has eight days of standby time, and charges in one hour.

Audience, a maker of voice processing technology that mimics the sort of audio processing that happens in the human brain, has announced its $15 million third round of financing.

We actually covered Audience’s unveiling in February, and first broke news on the funding, but the announcement fills out list of investors,and now includes Tallwood Venture Capital and VentureTech Alliance. We already mentioned Paul Allen’sVulcan Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

The Mountain View, Calif., company makes the A1010, a voice processor that can filter out noise and sharpen voice reception in cellular phone headsets. The company will use the money to accelerate its business growth.

The investment brings total funding amount to date to $45 million.

The A1010 groups and processes complex mixtures of sound and thus handles sound the way people actually perceive it and filter out noise. Trends in cellular usage will favor this company. Laws such as California’s upcoming law require cell phone users to use hands-free headsets while driving, but the quality of voice head sets is poor.

Some very smart people believe machines will take over — directing human affairs — sometime soon, perhaps within the next thirty years.

So much malarkey, you might think, until you consider the sorts of technologies being developed lately — some of which are starting to replicate human intelligence, one step at a time.

There’s Silicon Valley’s Numenta, the company started by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins, which is building a computer system that aims to think like the human brain. We’ve mentioned the company before, but Dean Takahashi, who starts writing for VentureBeat next week, provides an update about the fascinating company. Numenta’s software copies the human brain’s way of recognizing patterns with hierarchical memory (such as recognizing a dog shape; see image above and explanation here). Some 100 or so developers and eight companies are working to develop the software, and are applying it to several application areas, including visual object recognition and speaker voice identification.

It is the latter area, voice identification, that is seeing significant innovation — in part because of the booming mobile phone industry it serves. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, another Silicon Valley company, Audience, emerged saying it has build a chip and software modeled that aims to function like the human ear in order to improve the sound quality of cellphones. It suppresses background noise by mimicking the human ear, which breaks down sounds into recognizable components of speech, and can thereby ignore other sources of sound. See the New York Times story about the Mountain View, Calif. company.

It was started by Lloyd Watts, a neuroscientist who studied with the physicist Carver Mead of Cal Tech. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, along with several venture capital firms including New Enterprise Associates, have pumped in more than $22 million into the company, we’ve learned.

Forest Baskett, an investor at NEA, told VentureBeat that Audience blows away competing technologies. Incumbents include Forte Media, which uses technology that forms a beam in order to track your voice, but which can experience interference if background noise finds its way into the beam. There’s also Softmax, which uses multiple microphones, and assumes it can sort out which voice source to focus on, but can also breaks down in busy environments like airports, where you can have five to ten sound sources at any given time. Qualcomm recently bought Softmax.

Yesterday, another voice identification company Solicall, of Israel, emerged saying its sophisticated technology serves Windows Mobile, and beats existing sound identification technologies. SoliCall’s software focuses on the specific voice of the speaker, using a personalized filter that first learns your voice and afterwards, during any call, passes through only your voice and screens all other voices, noises and sounds. It’s based an algorithm for which the company has filed a patent.

These bite-sized developments, where technology starts to mimicking the human, aren’t doing it the centralized Frankenstein way, but from the edges, one step at a time.