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proactivaudio @ DemoDay by INiTS

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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, proactivaudio passed onto the next phase of incubation.

For a copy of our pitch and investor deck please contact us.

Car Cockpit: A Sensitive Auditorium

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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.

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ONLY DRIVER INSIDE.

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DRIVER AND PASSENGER INSIDE.

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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.

Teleconferencing Satisfaction: Audio is King

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During 2016 proactivaudio conducted a survey on teleconferencing satisfaction among professionals from public and private sectors. The survey aimed to understand what factors make good (and not that good) today’s videoconferencing systems for tele-collaboration. While the majority of the respondents were “neutral” or “somewhat satisfied” with their systems, it is the audio quality that turned out the main cause for negative feedback by far. Users may allow quite a few glitches in the video, but the same troubles in audio is a different story: users really need to understand their partners at all times.

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Why audio quality in teleconferencing is still not good enough? Three main factors can contribute to that undesired performance: 1) RTP/IP packet jittering, 2) speech/audio compression, and 3) acoustic echo. In the early days of audioconferencing, internet was not fast enough to handle easily speech communications real time, but those slow days are long gone, so the first factor is rarely a disturbing issue today. The same goes for the second factor: Audio compression has reached technological maturity, with Skype claiming superb performance for its audio coding standard Opus. Hence, the only bad guy left to blame onto is acoustic echo (and it is running out of excuses).

Acoustic echo per se is indeed the main cause of audio discomfort. But also echo forces users to wear headsets, which prevent several participants in the same room from taking part in the audio-conference. Echo is also the indirect cause of audio glitches when the parties happen to talk simultaneously: these annoying in-and-out disturbances are actually the doing of an echo suppressor system, which prevents loudspeaker and microphone from being virtually active at the same time. As side-effect, echo suppressor creates also the feeling of “being alone” or “not being heard”.

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How can we get rid of the acoustic echo efficiently, and by doing so, accomplish natural face-to-face tele-conversations? Since more than 20 years research engineers agree that an acoustic echo canceller is the solution to fix the problem. Good news. However, Skype and Google (to name a few) are yet to use effectively acoustic echo cancellation in their teleconferencing platforms. Why aren’t they? While we obviously cannot answer that question, from proactivaudio we can guess what they are missing. Check out our solution here.

proactivaudio goes INiTS

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INiTS is a business incubator designed to improve the rate of startup success in Vienna by helping entrepreneurs conceive, launch and grow the next great company. INiTS ranked as No. 11 worldwide and No. 3 in Europe. We are excited to announce that proactivaudio has been selected by INiTS for its Startup Camp, the first acceleration program in Austria, offering early-stage startups 100 days of training in order to achieve market fit.