We are far more advanced than our computers. The human body is a marvel of efficiency, resiliency and sophistication, and information technology has a long way to go before it catches up.
One way in which we are advanced is our nuanced audio-processing system. We can tell the difference between speakers easily, and we use audio clues to piece together things such as a speaker’s distance from us, his exact location, if he is moving, whether he is confident or nervous, and many other details.
Our telephone technology blunts this sophisticated audio processing engine in each of our heads. While we still can pick out mood changes in a speaker’s voice for the most part, the flattened and reduced audio quality covers some of the information that we otherwise would have about the person talking.
We’ve gotten so used to this reduced audio quality in our telephone calls that we hardly notice it is gone. Thankfully, VoIP and the high-definition calling that it enables helps us bring back some of what has been lost. Although not all VoIP implementations offer high-definition voice, business-grade systems do—and it gives audio quality beyond any traditional phone call.
This can be useful in a number of ways. First, high-definition calling can make for better conference calls.
One of the challenges with conference calls is that a number of disembodied voices are stuffed together on a call, making it hard to intuitively know who is talking and the actual dynamics of the participants in the room. We think we hear clearly enough with an average conference call connection, but in fact we do not.
This is why high-definition calling is being trumpeted by conference call providers such as Voxeet. The company has a new service that lets participants make easy conference calls, but in high definition. This HD-voice is one of the product’s main selling points.
High-definition voice also can benefit call recording.
A recording is only as useful as it is able to capture the conversation, and high-definition voice delivers crystal-clear conversations that are easy to understand later during review.
This clarity not only avoids muffled words in a recording, it also enables better speech analytics. Increasingly, call recordings are being used to mine data from calls, whether agent performance or flags that could pose a challenge for compliance. With high-definition voice, the ability of the speech analytics system to properly decipher what is said is greatly improved.
It is easy to consider high-definition voice as just another nice feature of VoIP. But once the technology gets integrated into business, it will be hard to imagine that we ever lived without it.
Edited by Alisen Downey