About Acoustic Magic
The Company
Acoustic Magic is a privately held company with the mission to build a family of superior array microphones for speech recognition, teleconferencing, meeting/classroom recording, and home automation applications.
The Application
Clear reception of speech in a noisy environment is a difficult problem. In speech recognition applications, such as dictation of documents, headset microphones are required to prevent noise from interfering with the recognition software and increasing the error rate to unsatisfactory levels. Acoustic Magic’s technology enables headset level accuracy with our Voice Tracker™ Array Microphone placed several feet from the talker. There is no longer a need to be tethered by the headset.
In teleconferencing applications, microphones are usually placed in the middle of the conference table to shorten the distance to the talkers, thereby improving signal to noise. Acoustic Magic’s Voice Tracker™ Array Microphone technology enables the microphone to be mounted on the monitor while still providing effective reception from all talkers, even in large rooms.
In home automation applications or desktop computer command and control, Acoustic Magic’s Voice Tracker™ Array Microphone technology will provide the best possible noise reduction and signal quality.
The Technology
Array Microphone
An array microphone is built from a string of microphones that are connected together through sophisticated signal processing that adds up the speech component from each microphone while canceling the noise component. Modern semiconductor technology has made this approach economically feasible.
In the past few years, several array microphones have been introduced commercially, and have received encouraging reviews. These 1st generation array microphones point (or listen) straight ahead and cancel noise coming from other directions.
Voice Tracker™, The Next Generation
Acoustic Magic's patented Voice Tracker™ Array Microphone technology locates the talker and electronically points (or listens) only to that location, even if it is significantly off axis. Because of this electronic pointing, the microphone can focus very tightly on the talker, spatially filtering noise from other sources. The higher signal to noise ratio that results enables the talker to be farther away from the microphone.
In addition, Voice Tracker's™ signal processing enables much greater fidelity at the higher end of the voice range compared to 1st generation array microphones.
In dictation applications, the active pointing and better frequency response leads to lower automatic speech recognition error rates. Active pointing also allows the speaker to move about, making dictation more comfortable.
In teleconferencing applications, the active pointing minimizes reverberations for better sound quality. In addition, the Voice Tracker™ Array Microphone automatically points to different talkers as soon as they start to speak.
The People
The Acoustic Magic team has perhaps the greatest concentration of array microphone expertise in the world. The team has 40 years of array microphone experience, and two of our three Ph.D.s did their theses in this field. The founder, besides having Electrical Engineering and Physics degrees from Columbia and Pennsylvania, has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and has served at the Division VP or Presidential level at Philips, Teradyne and Media 100.
