Creating ad hoc microphone arrays from personal devices (2019)

Would be cool if Microsoft gave more shits about privacy.

Edit: This would be cool if I trusted Microsoft to properly handle privacy.

I trust MS to not sell my data to every random jabroni on the net more than I trust Google.

This is a really interesting technical concept.

Capturing high-quality audio in a meeting room for videoconferencing is a notoriously complicated problem.

Microphones are crazy sensitive and pick up things like footsteps and conversations outside the door, shuffling feet and tapping on keyboards, and construction and HVAC noise like you wouldn't believe.

So filtering those things out, and then capturing the best quality audio from the current speaker, and trying to get everyone's voice at roughly the same volume whether they're sitting directly across from the microphone or are piping up from the corner of the room...

...and do this all while cancelling 100% of the echo that might be coming from two or three speakers at once...

...it's an insanely hard problem. Beamforming microphones absolutely help in a huge way, because if you know the speaker's voice is coming from 45° then knowing that any sound coming from any other angle can be removed is a really helpful piece of info.

Now, with beamforming microphones, the precise relative location and direction of each mic is known. The idea of creating one big beamforming mic for the room out of people's individual mics is... insanely hard, but super cool.

It's interesting to me that this article is about measuring the quality of voice transcription, rather than about the quality of audio in an actual meeting. But I suppose the voice transcription quality measurement is simply a proxy for the speaker audio quality generally, no?

This could actually be a huge step forward in not needing videoconferencing equipment in meeting rooms. So far, one of the biggest reasons has actually been dealing with echo and feedback -- when people are in the same call with multiple devices in the same room, it tends to end badly. But if the audio processing is designed for that... the results could actually be quite amazing.

And it's well-known that the "bowling alley" visual of meeting participants (camera at the end of a long conference table) isn't ideal. If each participant has their own laptop camera on themselves, it could be a vastly better experience for remote participants.

> What a time to be alive.

This technology was already available in the 60s with Kalman filters.

> This could actually be a huge step forward in not needing videoconferencing equipment in meeting rooms. So far, one of the biggest reasons has actually been dealing with echo and feedback -- when people are in the same call with multiple devices in the same room, it tends to end badly. But if the audio processing is designed for that... the results could actually be quite amazing.

> And it's well-known that the "bowling alley" visual of meeting participants (camera at the end of a long conference table) isn't ideal. If each participant has their own laptop camera on themselves, it could be a vastly better experience for remote participants.

It seems to me that these days the simpler solution to both these problems is to just have people use airpods.