NCT Lifts the Lid on Automotive Voice Technology (September 15, 2005)

NCT will present at Embedded Automotive, to be held near Cambridge, UK on Tuesday, 15th November. NCT is a world leader in the development of noise reduction, echo cancellation and signal conditioning, technologies that are essential for today's competitive voice systems.

NCT's 'ClearSpeech' technology is used in 3G mobile phones and hands-free car kits across the world and is even used in the extremely demanding environment of motor racing. NCT's ClearSpeech technology is a suite of complex, highly refined software algorithms that provide noise cancellation for human listeners, noise cancellation for voice recognition, echo cancellation and signal conditioning.

Nathan Blundy, Field Application Engineer, explained, "There are a lot of challenges when using voice systems within a vehicle cabin space. Whether it's the road noise or the echo that can be created by the cabin space or even extreme engine noise in motor sports applications, there is a lot of technology that goes into providing both the talker and the listener with the clarity of communication that they have come to expect. This presentation will explain some of the fundamental concepts that are used in this field."

The NCT team, a combination of mathematicians, software and acoustic engineers, has been developing voice technologies for the past 15 years, and the current version of ClearSpeech is the product of over 70 man-years of research and development. " Noise and echo in vehicles is not just concerned with mobile communications. With the anticipated growth of Interactive Voice Systems (IVS) within vehicles, it will be essential that the IVS will hear the talker with optimum clarity. We have been working on special technology to address this challenge and this will be discussed in the presentation also", said Nathan.

This year's Embedded Automotive seminar is entitled "Building The Perfect Beast" and is open to engineers and managers working in the embedded electronics space, or simply wishing to keep up to date with embedded technology. Covering such topics as voice systems in cars, using real time kernels in automotive design, future trends in debugging automotive systems and development tools, this seminar will represent a chance for embedded engineers to learn of the latest developments and meet with experts in this field.