The EU-startups magazine recently published an article about the most promising audio startups in Europe. Amongst them are 3 startups from Austria! proactivaudio is features as one of the 10 audio tech startups to look out for in 2018 and beyond: click here to access the full to article
The Austria Wirtschaftsservice, short AWS, is a public funding body for business related funding. proactivaudio is receiving pre-seed financing from AWS and so we have recently been featured in their seed and pre-seed brochure and on their website:
Whenever engineering meets art, usability and design are confronted, that is, if one aspect does great, the other one is at risk of going the other way. Harmony between both is key to persuade people to their next spontaneous buy, whether it is an electric car, a pair of jeans, a custom guitar or a digital gadget. In this last category, Apple (Inc) takes by own merit the banner for elegant design and exceptional user experience. Such an exercise of creativity and innovation is so exhaustive that, quoting Steve Jobs, “you have to say ‘No’ to 1000 things.” Let us call that innovation methodology into question in one of the very recent Apple creations, the iPad Pro.
In general we do like the iPad Pro (writing this very blog post with one of them). What we do not quite like so much is its sound system (what are you talking about?! the iPad Pro is the first ever tablet with a four-speaker audio system delivering unprecedented surround stereo sound!!). Let me explain. Of course we enjoy casual music listening on the iPad Pro, but its four-speaker audio system poses serious challenges for video/audio conferencing services such as FaceTime, Skype or Hangouts because the microphone is placed on a corner and a loudspeaker has hardly any other place to go than a corner (remember the iPad Pro has four speakers, i. e. corners). The result? Mainly Skype and Hangouts users have been complaining about unbearable echo when their conferencing peers are using an iPad Pro.
The workaround adopted by Apple to reduce the acoustic echo during videoconferencing has been namely to turn off the “loud” speaker near the microphone (the Voice Processing I/O system audio unit automatically takes care of this). But has this patch fixed the pain? In some sense it has (as the echo is passively reduced), but it has also led to a bizarre situation: because the iPad was born to be held with hands, the lower two speakers may get unintentionally blocked by the user, while Apple is deliberately shutting off the “conflicting” upper speaker. We do not need to go into detail on the complications that this “hands-on” scenario poses for any echo reduction system, but we cannot but wonder why the 1000 abandoned ideas were considered “not good enough”.
As it is always easier to criticize than to create, we decided to compare our acoustic echo reduction technology on the iPad Pro against Apple’s in a challenging scenario of permanent double talk. We are in clear disadvantage as we have to deal with four loud speakers altogether (because the Remote I/O audio unit needs to be used instead of the VPIO for custom processing). We also included Skype and Google Hangouts to the David-versus-Goliath fight. The average distortion infringed by each system to the main microphone signal was assessed for a normal loudness level (80% of maximum volume) and for maximum system volume (100%). The evaluation numbers are presented in the table below (where lower is better).
Distortion (dB)
80%
100%
FaceTime
5
11
Skype
7
12
Hangouts
9
15
proactivaudio
3*
7*
* all four iPad Pro speakers active
Three quick conclusions can be drawn from the numbers above: 1) FaceTime, Skype and Hangouts distort the main signal captured by the microphone, the more the louder the speaker volume; 2) despite both Skype and Hangouts appear to be using the system VPIO (as the conflicting loudspeaker does not emit any sound with their systems), they do not match Apple’s performance; and … 3) our echo reduction technology outperforms all giants, even with the fourth “loud” speaker active! We invite the reader to assess the results of the evaluation in the video below. We would have liked to run our VoIP prototype with one speaker less to make up our numbers even better. Still we believe that the iPad Pro microphone position deserves a second thought. Personally we cannot blame the speaker for playing its role at one of the corners, but it is the microphone which we assume has plenty of space to go.
The year 2017 will be for proactivaudio one to remember: we became a legal GmbH entity, managed to get important pre-Seed funding from AWS, and set our daily operations in Vienna’s High-Tech Campus. Our team is growing with Amar, Barbara, Hans-Peter, Luis and Mathias, all sharing viral enthusiasm on audio technologies and their endless possibilities. We are looking forward to 2018, to be an even more exciting year as we will make our unique B2C and B2B solutions for the next generation of audio front-end interfaces a reality. Stay tuned!
AES 2017 International Conference on Automotive Audio is going to take place September 8th-10th, 2017 in Burlingame, San Francisco, CA, USA. This is where we will showcase our innovative approach to Acoustic Echo Cancellation and Noise Cancellation.
Voice over LTE (VoLTE) will define future human communication for in-car calls and audio rates will rise > 16 kHz. This demands a far better echo cancellation than currently available on the market. proactivaudio offers a unique solution for audio quality of the 21st century.
We are looking forward to the feedback from the experts!
We have recently attended the latest AES Convention in Berlin as exhibitor, with a small booth. Most of the companies in the exhibition hall were famous manufacturers of professional audio equipment, such as Apogee, Amphion, Focusrite, Peerless by Tymphany, Solid State Logic, and a large etcetera: gorgeous loudspeakers, stage microphones, mixing studio tables, and networking equipment for the visitors to enjoy. A few Startups, such as Little Labs, it4you, hefio, and proactivaudio, were also showcasing their current prototypes of what can be the next game changer ;)
Yes, our booth was small for obvious reasons: we are a young Startup. But we also needed three walls for our loudspeaker sound to bounce back and forth multiple times. And it worked! the echo fingerprint was full of activity all the way up to 20 meters! Representatives from Qualcomm, Analog Devices, Riedel, Mathworks, and many more could experience our acoustic echo reduction working real-time on difficult acoustic conditions (boy, that hall was noisy!).
The odd effect of such a polyechoic booth was that our live audio was very reverberant, and obviously far from what one expects to find in such a fair. So from here, apologies to our neighbours who had to stand our live performance.
After months of startup acceleration and incubation spent in our early stage, a few messages settle in your head. The one message above all is — do not build a product that solves a problem, build one that fixes somebody’s pain. Easy said, however really getting to know your potential customers and their pain is a time-consuming and energy-draining task. But an indispensable and rewarding one. And why do I care to write about that for a post in the category of technology?
It turns out retrospectively that we were using somewhat unconsciously the “lean startup” approach in the technical conception of our invention, which we believe fixes somebody’s pain as well :). Similar to asking potential customers for market exploration, our solution asks the very acoustic echo reduction (AER) system about its own pains. I know the last sounds a bit nerdish, but when you look at state-of-art solutions to detect double talk (crossings by zero, spectral coherence, likelihoods, etcetera), you start wondering which one of those really understands AER’s language. All? None?
Finding out AER pains is kind of checking whether your stomach can tolerate spicy Mexican food you have never tried before (but without the inconvenience of going to the hospital if something goes wrong). And our system is doing such a “meal tasting” as if it were for the first time, that is, every time a new type of spice. The ultimate challenge is to understand how well the system is digesting the exotic meal by listening to its reactions conveyed in its own language. Thanks to this particular interpretation of the lean approach, our technology for acoustic echo reduction is fully operative under any double-talk circumstance, be it noise, music, voice, or altogether. Towards true full-duplex hands-free voice communications.
proactivaudio was pitching on stage at the Demo Day organized by INiTS on the 29th of November 2016. The pitch was followed by a showcasing of our technology to the interested audience.
Apart from reaching out to potential investors, the event also constituted an important milestone in the incubation programme of INiTS. With the feedback from the jury including investors, consultants and experts from the startup scene, proactivaudiopassed onto the next phase of incubation.
For a copy of our pitch and investor deck please contact us.
I love cars. Who doesn’t? The need for speed and engine roar literally push me in, ignoring the very reason of car existence (to take me from point A to point B). One more persuading argument to have an A-to-B do-not-care ride is to listen to my favourite music: a car interior with sound-absorbing upholstery is an excellent music auditorium, on a par with premium over-the-ear headphones. Sound absorption here refers to the ability to attenuate “bad” sound, such as reverberation, which would otherwise challenge the equalizer of the car’s sound system. So, dear reader, at this point you may have already guessed (when not earlier from the title) that this post does not exactly deal with four wheels and six cylinders.
Straight to the point. We measured the acoustics inside a 2015 Audi A7: as expected from Audi’s audio heritage and this premium model, our measurements revealed exquisite exponential sound decay with a time constant of 10 milliseconds; in other words, bouncing sound waves die out (25 dB attenuation) after travelling only 10 meters inside the compartment. Not bad at all. We exhaustively explored the car acoustics under different situations, such as driver only, driver+passenger, front windows open, sunroof, etcetera. The results were somewhat shocking: while the time constant remains essentially stable, the acoustic “fingerprint” changes dramatically in every situation. For instance, only the incremental impact of the front passenger is as large as the acoustic fingerprint itself! Obviously, you cannot blame the manufacturer for that, but it only shows how extremely sensitive and delicate (acoustically speaking) any car habitacle can be.
ONLY DRIVER INSIDE.
DRIVER AND PASSENGER INSIDE.
INCREMENTAL EFFECT OF PASSENGER.
The point is: driving with open windows and/or with your fiancé(e) is de-facto compromising the sound equalization settings, hence your in-car music experience. Here is when proactivaudio patented technology comes to rescue, as it is capable of estimating adaptively the interior acoustics under any hostile situation, such as with engine or wind noise, passenger conversation, or even singing while driving 8-) . As final note, in order to adjust automatically the perceptual equalization in the cockpit, the current fingerprint of the interior acoustics is indispensable.
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