Picture the scene from a spy movie. The hero whisks the girl into the bathroom and turns on the shower. “the room’s bugged!” he warns.

Maybe from now on, running a shower won’t help you. Well, not if Israeli start up SoliCall has anything to do with it. SoliCall has come up with a new way of removing background noise from phone calls.

Relax, SoliCall isn’t about James Bond or the CIA. It’s about fixing the problem of VoIP and mobile phone calls made in noisy situations. It uses your own voice as the filtering element, removing any other extraneous sounds from around you. Listen closely and I’ll tell you…

Anything for a quiet life?

When was the last time you were able to conduct a conference call without suffering the annoying street noises generated by at least one of the participants in that call or struggled to understand someone talking to you on a low-quality incoming mobile call?

We’ve all done it. We just can’t resist knocking out that quick email, flicking through papers or even brewing up while talking on the phone. Tapping away on the keyboard may seem innocuous enough, but at the other end, it sounds you’re in a news room on Fleet Street. So, do you have to sit in a sound proof bowl to avoid this?

Not any more. SoliCall believe they’ve found the solution. SoliCall’s PBXMate is designed to cut down on the extra noise leaking through and transmitted during your business calls. It reduces the background noise and improves voice clarity.

How it works

The solution takes a sample of your own voice and creates a filter to allow that through, while suppressing all other sounds that are out of band. The effects can be quite dramatic, as the graphs below indicate. The trace on the left shows spikes of background noise drowning out the lower volume of conversation.

“This will mark the end of noisy business calls, and especially conference calls,” says Shlomi Simhi, SoliCall’s Director of Marketing. “Our customers report a dramatic improvement in voice quality. It’s a whole new conversation experience.”

With more and more wireless-enabled mobile phones like Apple’s iPhone finding applications in the office, the problem of noise affecting conversations is likely to get worse as we become free to move around.

SoliCall’s PBXMate can work with any VoIP Network that supports SIP and it runs on Linux & Windows. For more information, visit SoliCall’s website.