Nokia Unveils 'Future of Voice Calls' (reuters.com) 57
Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark made the world's first phone call using "immersive audio and video" technology, which improves call quality with "three-dimensional" sound. The technology, part of the upcoming 5G Advanced standard, makes interactions more lifelike and is the biggest leap forward in voice calling since monophonic telephony. Nokia aims to license the technology, but widespread availability may take a few years.
3d voice calls? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who TF asked for this?
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I've seen projects happen where not even marketing wanted it done.
Currently dealing with the consequences of a development executive devoting a large number of employees to a work a pet project for the last three years that no customer, nor sales, nor marketing asked for, and suddenly trying to retroactively connect some business case to the effort he wanted.
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I think we worked for the same execs.
I was at a startup who had a great idea for corporate document storage, search, etc.
Marketing and sales went out and got some _really_ big names interested. Then when the first release was ready 6 months later, it turns out that engineering was building an entirely different product that no one knew about or asked for.
We shut the doors a month later. Good times!
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Based on my career, there's a lot of execs in all sorts of companies just like that. They know better than anyone what customers are ready to pay for, especially better than the customers themselves. Then the inevitable pissed off phase where they blame everyone and everything except themselves when the product is in fact a commercial failure. The customers for being so closed minded, the sales organization for not being able to convey the genius of the product, the marketing people for failing to properly
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I'd certainly spend a funny mod point on your comment, but on the serious side, the low quality of phone calls is unsettling to me. VoLTE has improved it, but the lack of stereophony is incomprehensible.
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I'll agree that calls are shockingly low quality. Only very recently has telephony moved to *sometimes* go up to 20khz. Bluetooth headsets are starting to support LC3, with the bluetooth headset being at best mSBC at 16khz before.
It would be fantastic to just pull the trigger and go up to 48khz.
However, I don't think spatial or stereophony will do much for calls, since the audio input is generally a single microphone.
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the audio input is generally a single microphone.
Nokia is certainly working with accessory makers to include a second microphone in standard in headsets. They'll need Google/Apple to cooperate and implement the transport layer, but according to TFS Nokia made it into the 5G specification, so there are chances it will be implemented (if Nokia is not too greedy with the royalties).
Re: 3d voice calls? (Score:1)
Get a decent pair of earbuds and the problem meaningfully goes away.
If not, get a better carrier that supports better codecs.
Voice calls for me sound plenty clear enough, and I've been spoiled by zoom calls with a gaming headset.
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Why would stereo make any difference for a phone call? The person speaking only has one mouth, unless they also literally talk out of their ass.
If you want stereo audio, you need to have at least two microphones, and they need to be some distance apart. And the use of doing so is to pick up higher signal fidelity when there are multiple sources of audio mixed, such as people playing musical instruments on a stage.
There would be no difference in a "stereo" voice call versus a "mono" voice call, because the
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Why would stereo make any difference for a phone call? The person speaking only has one mouth,
Stereophony recording is used for single sources of sound (e.g. soloist musician).
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Sure, because the vast majority of playback systems will be stereo, because it's a music application.
The phone you are holding to your ear may have "stereo speakers" but they aren't being used on a phone call (unless you're a speakerphone-in-public person) and even if they were, the stereo image is like 3 inches apart so you're not going to hear any stereo soundstage unless you have the phone two inches from your face.
Stereo is useless for voice communication, unless the goal is to use twice the bandwidth f
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I agree that phone speakers are unable to render stereophony usefully; this development is best used with headsets on both ends.
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More than that, what the fuck is it, actually?
The article doesn't say anything about what the difference is, other than flowery marketing bullshit. You know, stuff like:
new technology called "immersive audio and video" that improves the quality of a call with three-dimensional sound
Current smartphone calls are monophonic which compresses audio elements together and sound flatter and less detailed, but the new technology will bring 3D audio where a caller will hear everything as if they were there with the other person.
Well that sounds like a great answer to a question that nobody asked. Let me guess, it also requires me to have a phone and headphones that support some proprietary garbage "spatial audio" codec that serves no purpose other than to burn my batteries down doing unnecessary spatial processing that only makes it more likely that I'll miss som
Re: 3d voice calls? (Score:1)
I predict it will do just as well as 3d TV.
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The sound in cinemas is fantastic, but there we are probably talking about 5.1 or 7.1 sound, as far as I know.
Here, however, they are talking about 3D sound and that is not just 5.1 or 7.1. It must be some kind of processed sound that can also be experienced as coming from below and above. That is my guess anyway.
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After the huge success of 3d TVs, it's the next logical step...
People still do voice calls? (Score:2)
News to me. :-)
Nokia is about to wake up. (Score:2)
Samsung and Apple users: Nok-eh-a Who?
Nokia does infrastructure (Score:2)
Nokia offloaded the handset business (Nokia-branded phones are made by HMD Global now), but they still do cellular base stations and back-end stuff. The US-led boycott of Chinese 5G infrastructure suppliers was very good for Nokia. If you use telephone service, you're probably relying on Nokia products without realising it.
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And that's great, when they're delivering things that are useful.
3D audio on voice calls isn't useful. It's an answer to a question that nobody asked. And if they're going to be charging licensing for it, and manage to get it included into a global standard for compulsory licensing, then that's rent seeking.
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HMD has 30% market share in feature (dumb) phones (source https://mobilityarena.com/hmd-... [mobilityarena.com] ), which is a big market in the developing world. If Nokia can make high voice quality a standard in the "Global South", then smartphones maker selling in both north and south will have to follow.
I guess... (Score:2)
... thematically similar to my plan to provide an 8K live stream of the activities in my local haberdashery.
Stereo Sound (Score:2)
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So, it's made for doublespeak?
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So that way the stereo microphones on your handset that are half an inch apart from each other, and both of them are equal distance from your mouth when talking on the phone and receiving the exact same signal, can use twice the bandwidth to send the exact same signal twice, in L and R?
Or are we talking about including ambient noise, so you can hear less of your call than before because "it's more lifelike" when someone calls you from a busy restaurant or bar and it's transmitting all the background noise t
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It's because they have to create a reason for you to buy their shit.
No different than cereal that stays crunchy, even in milk.
We're seeing the end of all the low hanging tech fruit.
The only thing Apple can do is put more pixels on the screen.. ok maybe not more pixels, but OLED.
Google: you can erase a person from your photos.
Microsoft: we think you're a moron, so you'll need the AI we are shoving into every corner.
Microsoft: you want to acce
Stereo (Score:2)
Since the article mentions needing a phone with two mics, and providing spatial separation for conference calls, it just sounds like they are just sharing more than monaural, likely requiring double the bandwidth/data. It would also require good stereo separation to hear the results, which many wouldn't necessarily have. Call me dubious many others will license this "tech".
Stereo calls are billed at X2 the per minute rate! (Score:2)
Stereo calls are billed at X2 the per minute rate!
So two times zero? (Score:2)
Do you actually pay a per-minute rate for national calls? In a growing number of countries, national calls and all text messages are included in the base price and not metered. Only mobile data and international calls are metered. Australia has been like this for years, and Hong Kong was already like this over a decade ago.
Stereo With One Ear? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will I have a hard time hearing the "stereo" in a call if I'm holding my phone to only one ear?
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That's probably not targeting this kind of conversations. The younger people I see in the streets talk and laugh with their friends using headphones. Stay-at-home people talk to their relatives with headphones while doing their daily activities and chores.
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Will I have a hard time hearing the "stereo" in a call if I'm holding my phone to only one ear?
You hold your phone to your ear? What are you living in the 2010s? Wear stereo noise cancelling earbuds and shout your conversation through the middle of the train like a normal person.
LOL, ok grandpa (Score:2)
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*couldnt
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but then you probably also claim to "not give two fucks" as a retort to giving not giving one fuck so Im talking to a brick wall
can I opt out? (Score:2)
I don't need immersive sound with robocallers wanting to get ahold of me to talk about my car's extended warranty.
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You never talk far away relatives that matter to you, or elderly parents you might talk to for the last time? Voice is important. The current crap quality of sound in any and all of our communications is not a fatality.
Re: can I opt out? (Score:1)
Ever heard of Skype, WhatsApp or dozen of other messengers with video capabilities?
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Yes, and what's the relevance of your comment? I don't think any of them has stereo. Each of them can choose to improve their technical quality and report here. Video is off topic, it's for a different kind of calls.
Absolutely NOT the first. (Score:2)
Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark made the world's first phone call using "immersive audio and video" technology,
What are the chances that any engineers capable of designing this would hand them over to the CEO and a government official without testing it once?
I would guess there were at least a thousand test calls made before this PR stunt. It is probable that technicians made at least one test call between these exact two phones just before handing them over for this historic "first" call.
I guess if it wasn't done by guys in suits, it doesn't count.
Do we really need 5.1 audio on phone calls? (Score:2)
No need (Score:2)
"The technology, part of the upcoming 5G Advanced standard, makes interactions more lifelike..."
No one needs a phone call to be "more lifelike".
It's a fucking phone call, not a sexbot. Make sexbots more lifelike and I might be interested.
"Can you hear me now?" NOW IN 3D (Score:1)
Of all the problems ex-nokia could attempt to solve, making shitty phone calls sound less shitty is not in the top ten.
Providing tech to allow seamless connectivity between towers, providers, cellphone technology, and allow calls
NOT TO EVER GET DROPPED and to add positive documentation of WHO DROPPED THE CALL and to allow
auto-reconnect if the drop was not the result of an affirmative hit of the "end call" button.... THOSE would be useful.
Nokia used to be a thing. Then it Microsofted itself. Now ex-nokia h
It's the IMS-Hype (Score:2)
On mobile networks there is the idea of an "IP-Multimedia Subsystem" which tries to bring ISDN-like features into IP-based networks. Essentially you can split up your data packets into separate "bearers", each one having a defined quality of service and perhaps different billing. This is in stark contrast to the way the rest of the world tries to do it, by just providing enough capacity so virtually no packet will ever be dropped. Doubling the capacity of your access network is much cheaper when it's just E
3D Voice Calls? (Score:2)
We apparently can't spend enough bandwidth on a call today to keep the voices from popping and snapping. Who is going to waste still more bandwidth to hear people "around" them during call? This has failure stamped on it hard at the conception level. Let's not even talk about trying to convince executives that it's extremely important to hear their call-in employees surrounding them at the table, rather than coming from a central speaker.
Nokia aims to license the technology (Score:2)
No one wants an over-price codec. The best interoperability is based on open standards.
Oh, wow, just what... (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't ask for.
Around 2010, I heard a review on the radio of the latest gen of phones. They spent 9 of 10 min talking about all the features, then, in the last minute, asked "how's the voice quality?" You know, the reason you have a frekain' phone? The answer was these two were mediocre, all the rest were terrible.
My land line does better than your mobile. How about better mikes and speakers?
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There's probably a reason for this.
The number of times I use my phone for a voice call: zero. I do use voice in some chat apps, such as WhatsApp which don't give a shit about anything the 3GPP releases as a standard. Now you may think the quality of the voice of the handset itself impacts that but ... it really doesn't. Tell me more about the quality of voice through your headset, through your earbuds, or through whatever other wireless strapped to the head technology many people use to actually make calls.
Need to measure and vote with wallet. (Score:2)
We need a consumer union. We've kind of tried with review sites, but there are no teeth to them. And they're paid (or supported) by the manufacturers (to get devices to test for instance).
Wonder if the EU will consider quality testing, not just functional certification. Then a user-centric set of tests and results could be applied against all devices that want to be sold, and by the same group so you can trust they're apples to apples.
In the end if the customer buys it, they'll sell it.
Personally I think
How long before Apple... (Score:2)
Finally (Score:2)
Funny that a voice has a singular source. (Score:2)
Seriously, modern 'voice quality' over a phone might as well be speech to text on one end and text to speech on the other...