Noise and echo reduction comes to Bluetooth

Voice technology specialist NCT has released its ClearSpeech technology for Cambridge Silicon Radio's BlueCore3.

Voice technology specialist NCT has released its ClearSpeech technology for Cambridge Silicon Radio's BlueCore3.

This development will enable Bluetooth developers worldwide to benefit from NCT's noise and echo reduction technology, helping manufacturers meet consumer expectations for high quality voice-based Bluetooth devices.

With the uptake of Bluetooth for telephony headsets and hands-free car kits, the demand for technologies that can improve the communication quality of these devices is increasing dramatically.

NCT's porting of its powerful ClearSpeech echo and noise reduction technology to CSR's BlueCore3-Multimedia silicon represents an important stage in their efforts to make ClearSpeech available to this emerging market.

"We are very excited about this development", said Dr Gillian Davis, Managing Director of NCT.

"Our ClearSpeech echo and noise reduction for the BlueCore3 provides up to 50dB of echo cancellation and 18dB of noise reduction and can handle echo path lengths of between 8 and 32ms, offering optimum performance for both headset and hands-free applications".

The BlueCore3 is a single-chip device that integrates Bluetooth technology with a 32MIPS open platform DSP coprocessor and 16bit stereo audio codec, providing a convenient and economic means of delivering advanced signal processing solutions for Bluetooth applications.

ClearSpeech is a suite of complex, highly refined software algorithms that provide noise cancellation for human listeners, noise cancellation for voice recognition, echo cancellation and signal conditioning.

By removing background noise and voice echo, ClearSpeech is able to vastly improve voice quality in a diverse range of communication systems.

Both the Bluecore3 and ClearSpeech are readily available for evaluation.

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