Even if you haven't heard of Audience, there's a very good chance you (or a close friend or family member) have used a product with one of its audio processing chips installed. The company, which prides itself in its noise-cancelling prowess, is taking to CES to launch its latest high-end processor, dubbed the eS515. This particular chip offers a new high-performance, low-power codec subsystem and integrates a handful of impressive features along with it. First on the laundry list of improvements is support for up to three mics on a singular device; while we've seen the three-mic setup on a limited scale in the past (Qualcomm has done it on its development phones), Audience's implementation may be the first to arrive on commercially available phones. Since it's currently sampling to manufacturers, we may not have to wait terribly long.

In addition to the three-mic support, the eS515 also throws in a few other handy tools, such as de-reverb, which is meant to significantly reduce the voice echo users normally experience on speakerphones and in large rooms; a selective audio capture feature called Audio Zoom, which lets you switch back and forth between a bi-directional recording mode and single-direction narrator mode; new hardware-accelerated speech recognition algorithms that's geared to interpret your voice more accurately; and dual-mic noise suppression when taking video. It all sounds pretty tempting, and we're eager to see how well Audience holds up on its claims -- we're still waiting to hear which upcoming devices will have the chip installed, but our guess is that it'll show up on a handful of premium smartphones in the coming year. We've got the press release below for your dissection.

Continue reading Audience eS515 Smart Sound Processor brings three-mic support and selective audio capture to phones

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

Comments