Google announced today that it has purchased the firm Limes Audio, a Swedish sound company specializing in acoustic echo cancellation and sound enhancement.
This operation confirms Google's intentions to continue improving sound and call quality across its entire range of products, particularly Google Hangouts.
Noise-laden environments such as cafes and city streets, but also internet connections that offer poor quality, can have a negative effect on the audio quality of an online conversation, in such a way that It can often be difficult to understand the person at the other end.
Currently, hardware solutions such as noise canceling microphones are designed to filter out ambient noise and today, they are standard in most mid-range and high-end phones however, the truth is that they do very little to reduce echoes, and they do absolutely nothing to fix connectivity issues.
Faced with it, software solutions such as technology developed by Limes Audio can work in concert with hardware solutions to improve sound qualityor even in the most difficult circumstances.
Serge Lachapelle, Director of Product Management at Google Cloud, announced the acquisition through the Google blog:
Today, we are excited to announce the acquisition of Limes Audio. The Limes Audio team builds technology that makes voice communication systems sound better, so you can hear the person you're talking to and they can hear you.
While Google has yet to explicitly confirm any immediate plans for when or how it will integrate Limes Audio technology into products like Hangouts or YouTube Live, it is pretty clear that this is something we are going to hear about throughout. of this 2017 that we have just released.