Hands-free systems make it easy for drivers to keep their hands on the wheel while making or taking phone calls. But as any automotive acoustics engineer will tell you, creating a cost-effective, high quality hands-free system is anything but easy.

For instance, when you make a hands-free call, the other person’s voice is played back over the car’s speakers. The problem is, the sound also goes to the microphone. Without special processing of that microphone signal, the other person will hear an echo of their own voice and almost invariably hang up. This special processing is called acoustic echo cancellation, or AEC, and is at the heart of any automotive voice solution.

A well designed acoustic echo cancellation solution will let both people in a call talk at the same time – and even talk over each other, as often happens in face-to-face conversations. It is hard to do this well even in a quiet environment like a home or office, but in the extremely noisy and physically constrained environment of a car it calls for a specialist approach.

The background noise of a car – whether it is from air vents or from tires rolling over the road surface – presents even more challenges for voice communications. Again, these go beyond the capabilities of a generic noise-removal system and demand a solution optimized for the harsh acoustic world of the car.

A hands-free solution must also be capable of providing a "high definition" voice experience in the car. This demand is being created by smartphones, which are fueling a rapid proliferation of high quality voice communication applications and driving the deployment of end-to-end wideband (high bandwidth) voice calling over mobile networks. As voice calling quality increases in bandwidth, the signal processing requirements for echo cancellation and noise reduction in the car will only continue to grow.

The QNX^® Acoustics for Voice software solution provides an integrated set of voice communication technologies designed and optimized specifically for automotive hands-free applications – including the acoustic requirements of smartphone connectivity. Based on technology that has been deployed in tens of millions of vehicles and in hundreds of platforms worldwide, this solution features breakthrough technology that reduces CPU load and memory requirements by up to 30% over previous solutions. It is field-tested, robust, and meets all the challenges of automotive voice communications.

An extensive set of tools helps customers fine-tune their deployment for almost any vehicle challenge - from microphone placement issues to specific noise sources. QNX Acoustics for Voice also offers design flexibility, allowing customers to choose from a variety of CPUs and OS targets.

Highlights include:

• Breakthrough high efficiency technology that reduces CPU load and memory requirements by up to 30% while maintaining the same uncompromising levels of quality
• Capability to meet acoustic performance requirements for the latest smartphone connectivity protocols on existing hardware platforms
• Industry-leading tools for rapid in-vehicle tuning and system diagnostics
• Scalable library of algorithms structured as pre-defined modules
• Portable, compact C/C++ callable library compatible with any operating system (e.g. QNX Neutrino, Linux, Windows CE) or dedicated DSPs, that includes both fixed and floating point optimized versions
• Innovative broadband noise reduction and automated equalization technology

For more information on the QNX Acoustics for Voice solution, visit our product page.