DSP Concepts Adds TalkTogether to Audio Weaver

DSP Concepts, provider of the Audio Weaver platform that powers more than 50 million devices for many consumer and automotive manufacturers, today launched TalkTogether, a highly scalable and fully integrated solution focused on human-to-human communications.

Offering natural, full-duplex voice seamlessly deployed into Audio Weaver designs, TalkTogether removes the complexity and risk inherent in the design, development, and deployment of voice communication products. Like TalkTo, DSP Concepts' audio front end solution, TalkTogether brings the same design flexibility and crystal clear audio to human-to-human communication, only available through the Audio Weaver framework.

"Whether you're designing a smart exercise machine that lets people talk to their friends or a sound bar that delivers clear, long-range voice for Zoom meetings and Xbox gaming sessions, the power and value of voice has never been more evident," said Chin Beckmann, CEO of DSP Concepts, in a statement. "Unfortunately, product makers are often reliant on black-box third-party voice solutions to deliver high-quality experiences. With TalkTogether, we remove that risk and complexity, open the black box so designers can customize every part of their design, and allow them to quickly bring their innovations to market."

TalkTogether allows for integration with any personal, gaming, work, or public communications device and can address near-field to far-field voice calls. TalkTogether is also ACM-certified, removing yet another common barrier for bringing voice designs to market. Other industry standard conferencing platform certifications will be announced in the next several months.

TalkTogether is part of a larger audio processing suite that contains PlayPack playback processing and TalkTo. Primary components that make up TalkTogether include microphone arrays, direction of arrival (DoA), beamforming, VAD, noise reduction, de-reverb, AEC, residual echo cancellation, Tx and Rx AGCs, and reduction of external noises such as keyboard clicks.

"The core mission of Audio Weaver has always been to give product makers a trusted framework that simplifies and accelerates every step of the audio design process so that engineers can focus on innovation, and TalkTogether is a natural extension of that mission," said Paul Beckmann, chief technology officer of DSP Concepts, in a statement. "We have over 500 optimized processing modules in Audio Weaver, and each of them can take weeks or months of work off a designer's plate. Sometimes a challenge is so complex or a category is so large that it demands an even more sophisticated design like TalkTo or TalkTogether, and it's not an overstatement to say that these solutions can save years spent on designing, debugging, tuning, and certifying their product."

"The market opportunity for voice is growing rapidly, propelled by enhancements in the underlying technologies. Shipments of voice-enabled products are forecast to reach 3 billion devices annually by 2024, contributing toward an installed base exceeding 7.8 billion globally," said Simon Forrest, principal technology analyst at Futuresource Consulting, in a statement. "Product designers are now harnessing opportunity to further refine their voice solutions, utilizing the dual advantages of edge-based [artificial intelligence] and audio processing technologies integrated directly into silicon chips. We expect this to give rise to domain-specific voice assistants and improve the capabilities of voice first interfaces as the market matures further. DSP Concepts assembles the essential voice components into a flexible, low-code framework; this removes a lot of the barriers and risk that come from mixing and matching third-party solutions."

With TalkTogether, Audio Weaver provides designers with a wide range of audio capabilities to deploy designs for vertical applications featuring the following:

• Natural, full duplex calls on device and through over-the-top applications such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom;
• Noise suppression for indoor/outdoor environments, including wind noise, double talk, music playback, and device noise;
• Multi-microphone configurations combined with fixed or adaptive beamformer with SCNR for directional voice pickup;
• Speaker tracking and automatic gain matching for reliable speech quality from across the room;
• Full suite of loudspeaker processing algorithms that can be tuned jointly with TalkTogether; and
• Alexa Calling, Messaging and Announcements (ACM) certified.

"The accelerated development time we achieved by building on Audio Weaver has been crucial to Milo's success, but just as important is its unique position as an all-in-one solution for audio development," said Peter Celinski, CEO and founder of Milo, in a statement. "Bringing TalkTogether to Audio Weaver is very valuable, and the fact they've opened it up so developers can customize the module for their applications' precise needs is a true game changer. We would not choose to build on any other platform."