Technology Opportunities

Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) systems have become a basic tool with ever growing popularity. However, they commonly rely on an unreliable communication channels, such as the internet, and are subject to frequent events of data loss. Lost data packets create gaps in audio sequences that, if left untreated, form breaks in the audio and can render speech unintelligible. For this reason, VoIP applications regularly incorporate a packet loss concealment mechanism (PLC) to counter the degradation in audio quality. Most existing techniques have difficulty dealing with long audio gaps. We have developed a novel algorithm that reduces artifacts and increases intelligibility of even large data losses.