VocalZoom
Systems’ breakthrough microphone could put an end to the main problem plaguing
voice-recognition tech
By Ruthie Blum Klein, leichman, Israel21C
Have you
ever tried to “ask Siri” a question on your smartphone and received a
ridiculous answer? Or been informed by “her,” or ‘him” that what you are saying
doesn’t compute?
Have you
ever been in your car and tried to phone someone by using your voice instead of
your
This has
happened to many of us.
Though
“voice recognition” may be one of the cooler functions we have on our digital
equipment, it is often quite faulty due to a number of factors, chief among
them background noise. But there’s good news on the horizon.
An Israeli
startup called VocalZoom
Systems has just made a technological breakthrough that is about to
put an end to this particular frustration. Even its president and active chair
Yechiel Kurtz, a serial angel investor with many exits under his belt, calls
the innovative gadget a “bit like science fiction.”
In its
laboratory in Yokneam, the VocalZoom team – with funding from the 3M Corporation,
Motorola Solutions and Jerusalem-based VC OurCrowd – has been working since the
company’s inception in 2010 to develop a microphone built to eliminate
extraneous noise from the source.
It is a
highly specialized group of professionals. Founder and CEO Tal Bakish is a VLSI
(very large-scale integration) engineer with a background in physics; Reuven
Elhamias is an electronics engineer with expertise in signal processing
algorithms; operations VP Jaron Peleg has experience in system and mechanical engineering;
Mark Raipel is a voice DSP (digital signal processing) algorithm expert; Dr.
Tal Fishman is an expert in physics, chemistry, optics and lasers, electronics
and material processing.
Measures
vibrations of facial skin
Kurtz
explains their innovation – for which VocalZoom won the MIXIII 2014 WOW startup
competition for best Israeli innovation — as follows:
“When you
talk into a regular acoustic microphone, your voice creates sound waves,” he
tells ISRAEL21c. “The microphone picks up these sound waves, but it also picks
up background noise. Our microphone does something completely different. It
uses an optical laser beam to measure the vibrations of the facial skin of the
person speaking.”
The laser
(which he assures is “very eye-safe”) — is directed at the face of the person
talking, and it measures vibrations “in the order of tens and hundreds of
nanometers — so small that nothing else can pick them up.”
These
micro-measurements of the skin are converted into audio. And because of their
precision, aim and novel method of sidestepping sound waves, no other
surrounding noise interferes with the clarity of the voice.
“No other
audio technology today measures facial vibrations, certainly not remotely,” he
says.
The output
of the VocalZoom microphone is a clear projection of the voice of the person
talking, without any other background interference. (Click here to see a demonstration of the technology).
Kurtz
stresses the significance of VocalZoom in a world where speech recognition is
becoming the
But thus
far, he says, “It just hasn’t been working in any real-life conditions, which
rarely involve a totally confined, quiet room. And this means reaching only 20%
to 30% accuracy.”
With
VocalZoom’s optical-laser technology, using Siri, Google Voice and other
voice-recognition apps will be a whole different experience. At the moment, the
company is in the process of selling its components to smartphone makers and
car manufacturers.
The
estimated time frame for VocalZoom to enter the mass market is the end of 2015,
and Kurtz expects to see end-use products by the second half of 2016.