If a meeting participant on the other end is able to parse the words you’re saying, they’re unlikely to speak up and say, “Hey, I’m having a little trouble hearing you.” They will simply allow the meeting to continue. And if you don’t have a really strong level of audio quality, you’re going to be asking people you’re talking to spend a lot more brain power just trying to determine the words you’re saying. And you will get tired of listening. And your message will not come across. Conversely, if you’re willing to take a little time with your audio set up, you can really convey the full power of your message and who you are to your peers, your employees, your boss, your suppliers, and of course your customers. In 2020, it very quickly became a marketing story we had to tell immediately.
And I have to say, it’s very gratifying to see Brian’s research in the news because, for me, it was like, “Yeah, this is what we’re experiencing. And this is what we’re trying to educate people about.” It makes a lot of sense to have real science to support it. But from that, developments on improvements in key audio processing algorithms accelerated throughout the AV industry.
I think, Megan and Brian, you probably remember when you were on calls and meetings, or people were eating potato chips and things like that, you would hear the loud sound of keyboards. But you don’t hear that much today because most platforms have invested in AI-trained algorithms to remove unwanted noise. And I know we’ll talk more about that later.
But the other thing, thankfully, was that as we got into the late spring and summer of 2020, was that educational institutions, particularly universities, and businesses also realized that things needed to change quickly. Nothing was ever going to be the same. And universities realized that all classrooms would need mixed capabilities for both remote students and in-class students. And that helped the professional AV equipment market recover as we were completely shut down in the months prior. But the focus on hybrid meeting spaces of all types led to more investment and more R&D in building tools and developing those key audio processing algorithms for more and different types of venues and use cases. And since then, we’ve actually seen a proliferation of a variety of unobtrusive audio capture devices based on a series of microphones and the supporting signal processing behind them. And right now, machine-learning-trained signal processing is actually the norm. And all this, unfortunately, was accelerated by the pandemic.
Megan: Yes. As you say, it’s an interesting period of change. And Brian, what did you see and experience in academia during that time? How did that time period influence the work in your lab?
Brian: I’ll admit, Megan, I never really thought about audio quality or anything like that, certainly until the pandemic hit. I was thrown into it, just like the rest of the world was. I don’t believe I ever had a single video conference with a student or a class or anything like that before the pandemic hit. But in some ways, our experience in universities was quite extreme. I went from teaching an in-person class with 300 students on Tuesday to suddenly being on Zoom with everyone on Thursday. Business meetings come in all shapes and sizes. But this was quite extreme. This was a case where I was suddenly talking to hundreds of people on Zoom. And every single one of them knows exactly what my voice sounds like, except me, because I’m just speaking my normal voice and I don’t know how it’s being translated through all the different levels of technology.
I would say, part of our general rhetoric about the pandemic is focused on all the negativity and the lack of personal connection and nuance and the fact that we can’t see how everyone is paying attention to each other. Our experience was more of a mixed one. Let me just tell you one story. Shortly after the pandemic began, I began teaching a seminar with about 20 students. And yes, it was still online. What I did is I just invited, on any given day, whatever topic we were discussing, I sent a note to whoever was the clear world leader in the study of that topic. I said, “Hey, don’t prepare for the conversation. You don’t have to answer any questions. But just join us on Zoom and participate in the conversation. Students will read some of your work.”
Every single one of them said, “Let me check my schedule. Oh, I’ve been stuck at home for a year. Sure. I’d be happy to do that.” And it was very positive. This experience gave students an opportunity to learn about cognitive science. And it’s true that these were all technical difficulties, but they would never have happened if we were teaching the class in real life. It would have been a lot of travel and airfare, hotels and scheduling and all that. So, it was a mixed situation for us.
