A piece of audio equipment is provided that includes a first signal path including a first dynamic range expander and a lowpass filter. The piece of audio equipment also includes a second signal path parallel to the first signal path, wherein the second signal path includes a second dynamic range expander and a highpass filter. The piece of audio equipment further includes a summing amplifier configured to receive a first signal from the first signal path, a second signal from the second signal path, and a clear signal from an audio source and output a summed signal.

A wireless transceiver including: an array of antennas; a plurality of transmit and receive path components; an array of microphones; a composite spatial diagnostic circuit and a rule execution circuit. The plurality of components form transmit and receive paths coupled to the array of antennas for processing wireless communications. The composite spatial diagnostic circuit couples to the array of antennas and to the array of microphones to successively sample respectively a WiFi environment and an acoustic environment surrounding the wireless transceiver and to determine from each set of WiFi and acoustic samples a composite spatial map of humans and wireless transceivers within the surrounding environment. The rule execution circuit executes an action proscribed by a selected rule when a related portion of the composite spatial map sampled by the composite spatial diagnostic circuit exhibits a correlation above a threshold amount with a spatial context condition associated with the selected rule.

Sound objects are identified within a content item and location metadata is extracted from the content item for each sound object. A reference layout is generated, relative to a user position, for the sound objects based on the location metadata. If a first sound object is within a threshold angle, relative to the user position, from a second sound object, a virtual position of either the first sound object or the second sound object is adjusted by an adjustment angle.

[Object] To provide a speech intelligibility improving apparatus capable of generating highly intelligible speech in various environments without unnecessarily amplifying sound volume. [Solution] A speech intelligibility improving apparatus 250 includes: an envelope surface extracting unit 292 extracting, from a spectrum of speech signal 254 as an object of processing, a curve representing a general outline of peaks of spectral envelope in contact with or along local peaks of spectral envelope of the spectrum; a noise adapting unit 300 modifying spectrum of speech signal 254 based on the curve extracted by envelope surface extracting unit 292; and a sinusoidal wave speech synthesizing unit 305 generating a modified speech signal 260 for the speech improved in intelligibility based on the spectrum modified by noise adapting unit 300.

A system includes a plurality of microphones positioned at different microphone locations, a plurality of loudspeakers positioned at different loudspeaker locations, and a dispatch system in communication with the microphones and loudspeakers. The dispatch system derives a plurality of voice signals from the plurality of microphones, computes a confidence score about the inclusion of a wakeup word for each derived voice signal, compares the computed confidence scores, and based on the comparison, selects at least one of the derived voice signals and transmits at least a portion of the selected signal or signals to a speech processing system.

A plurality of microphones are positioned at different locations. A dispatch system in communication with the microphones derives a plurality of audio signals from the plurality of microphones, computes a confidence score for each derived audio signal, compares the computed confidence scores. Based on the comparison, the dispatch system selects at least one of the derived audio signals for further handling, receives a response to the further processing, and outputs the response using an output device. The output device does not correspond to the microphone that captured the selected audio signals.

A plurality of microphones positioned at different locations. A dispatch system in communication with the microphones derives a plurality of audio signals from the plurality of microphones, computes a confidence score for each derived audio signal, and compares the computed confidence scores. Based on the comparison, the dispatch system selects at least two of the derived audio signals for further handling. Comparing the computed confidence scores includes determining that at least the two selected audio signals appear to contain utterances from at least two different users.

An communication system supports communication paths within an environment by receiving speech signals of a speaker and playing it back for one or more listeners. Signal processing tasks are split into a microphone related part and into a loudspeaker related part. A sound processing system suitable for use in an environment having multiple acoustic zones includes a plurality of microphone communication instances coupled and a plurality of loudspeaker instances.

A gaming system is configured for dynamic and location-specific management of sound in a gaming environment. Various gaming stations, each including sound receivers and sound emitters, are disposed across multiple gaming zones. A server communicates with the gaming stations and is configured to sample ambient sounds with respect to the plurality of zones, and identify zone-specific exception sound signatures with respect to a dynamic noise threshold for at least a first of the plurality of zones, such as for example a jackpot or equivalent hot spot in the gaming environment. One or more gaming machines external to the first zone are directed to locally amplify sounds associated with the identified zone-specific exception sound signatures for the first zone. The server may further direct sound emitters external to the first zone to emit sound waves effective to locally suppress particular ambient sounds other than the identified zone-specific exception sound signatures.

A unified communications system enables a user to simultaneously manage real time voice communication with background audio streams such as a music. In one embodiment, the system comprises a plurality of devices connected through a persistent voice over IP channel, where each device is playing background audio independently, and each device is operatively coupled to a microphone. When a connected user speaks, Voice Activity Detection results in the automatic adjustment of background audio on other connected devices, the adjustments based upon user-input settings on each device.