Software

We will help you integrate our software into your system. This includes initial microphone array design, software integration, regression testing, and diagnostic reporting. In addition, we include some basic audio tests to validate your hardware during prototyping and production runs.

Audio hardware

Successful audio products must start with good hardware design. It’s difficult if not impossible to fix designs late in the product life cycle. With some up-front design work, the hardware can be done right, which will allow the speech processing to work optimally. Although our algorithms can work the sub-optimal hardware designs, and in fact they can make an otherwise unusable system usable, it’s best to start with good design.

The basic aspects of hardware design are:

• acoustical design

  • transducers (microphone/loudspeaker) selection and design

  • transducer mounting

• mechanical design

  • since the loudspeaker is essentially a motor vibrating your entire design, it’s critical that every aspect of the mechanical design is thought out and buzz/rattle free.

  • seals and gaskets — sound has to go where you want it to go.

• electrical design

  • microphone signal levels are extremely low — on the order of 2-3 microvolts in quiet rooms. This requires close attention to electrical design, grounding and layout.

We have experience in all of the above aspects of system design and optimization. The earlier we can help you with your design, the more likely it is to get to market on time with the performance you expect.

Glossary

In order to keep things clear, we like to define terms to reduce ambiguity.

• talker: A person in the same room as the product with the MMFX algorithm running.

• loudspeaker: the acoustical transducer that produces sound.

• speaker: we generally never use this term because it causes confusion between whether you’re talking about a talker or a loudspeaker.

• AEC: Acoustic echo canceler

• MEMS Mic: Very small microphones that are built with silicon-type processes. These are very consistent, high quality microphones, but they do suffer from a noise floor problems due to their tiny size. These are improving all the time, and may reach parity with ECM microphones. MEMS microphones are nearly universal in cell phones now, but they are generally not used for far-field pickup due to their higher noise floor.

• ECM Mic: A more traditional microphone (electret condenser microphone) that has been the workhorse for the audio industry for many years. They are inexpensive, and can be very good quality. They generally suffer from significant phase-shift at both the low and high frequencies, making them a bit challenging for microphone arrays.