Tablets, Mobile Devices Get Silicon Boosts for Voice, Wireless

If you think today's mobile devices are anywhere close to what they could be two years down the road, think again. Android tablet manufacturers are looking for any edge they can get in a crowded marketplace, with faster and better features playing a key role in tomorrow's models, while the "traditional" ultrabook fights to keep its place. Audience and Wilocity are showcasing new voice processing and faster wireless connectivity this week in their respective bids to improve tablet hardware.

Voice processing is a key feature for mobile devices, providing a hands-free user interface for convenience and safety and the necessity of providing background noise suppression for a voice application -- the difference between "HD voice" and "HD noise" on a phone call or other discussion. 

Audience's newly announced earSmart eS320 is specifically designed for tablets, ultrabooks and all-in-one PCs to provide a better user experience for voice-enabled apps on any non-phone device. A 360-degree voice feature allows a user to move freely around a device while keeping voice quality the same by using just two microphones. Fewer parts keep costs down while end-users don’t have to worry about which way they are orientated to the device while speaking. (I see some sort of stand-on-head/yoga commercial coming...)

The new eS320 chip also includes "Super Wideband Noise Suppression" for VoIP calls to filter out background noise during a high-quality (HD voice) call and also providing acoustic echo cancellation and de-reverb in larger, resonant spaces. Finally, Audience ASR Assist technology provides customer hardware-accelerated algorithms to help cleanly isolate a speaker's voice from surrounding environmental noise to dramatically improve work recognition accuracy and task improvement; there's also the ability to do such things as transcribing a VoIP call in real-time even with background noise present.

Designed for PC and Android-based devices, the first consumer devices using the earSmart eS320 are expected to be on the market from Q42013 - just in time for the holiday season.

Faster wireless speeds are also in the works via 60 GHz multi-gigabit technology. Wilocity and DisplayLink are demonstrating WiGig-enabled 4K graphics and video this week at a couple of industry events this week. It's true today few people can afford the beauty of a 50-inch or larger UltraHD display, but the underlying story here is the ability to broadcast at rates up to 7 Gbps locally without having to fret with congestion in 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bands.

I'm a big fan of WiGig since it provides high-speed data rates that will be necessary for quickly backing up tablets, syncing data, and downloading video for entertainment. So far, 60 GHz hasn't come along as fast as I have hoped, but maybe we'll see more mainstream usage this fall and into 2014, regardless of what monitor type you can afford.

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