Last week during Enterprise Connect Dolby Laboratories launched their newest solution Dolby Voice Room. The solution allows Dolby to fully enter the market for huddle room and small conference room spaces. They aim for Dolby Voice Room to provide a more affordable and simple solution in the workplace.
The Dolby Conference Phone forms the basis of the solution. It utilises Dolby’s expertise within the audio field to enable a more user friendly and accessible solution for meeting rooms. Dolby have endeavoured to make the user-interface as simple and easy to use as possible.
The full Voice Room solution combines the Dolby Conference Phone, the Dolby Voice Camera and Dolby Voice Hub to create and all-encompassing solution for collaboration spaces. Dolby have also ensured that installation for technical deployment staff is as simple as possible and the full solution can be installed in as little as 15 minutes.
During EC 2018 we were lucky enough to test the solution first hand. We also spoke to Andrew Border, Vice President, Communications Business Group at Dolby Laboratories about their new offering.
“Customers have a huge amount of interest in building new collaborative workspaces – we spoke to customers, they want that Dolby audio experience so that really meant adding the video component to what we were doing”
The new Dolby Video Room solution has many unique features and benefits. It operates with Dynamic levelling which continuously maps room sound to distinguish between the intended audio from the speaker and unwanted background interference. On the visual side the Dolby Voice Camera utilises HDR (high dynamic range) video mapping which adjusts the image to different lighting situations to provide a high-quality representation of the room, overcoming muddled or washed-out images.
To reduce the human error factor within framing, Intelligent scene framing adjusts the framing of the image to give everyone the most relevant view of the meeting by automatically and noiselessly zooming in or out and panning as needed to provide the best view of the meeting.
“It’s (Dolby Voice Room Solution) actually doing some pretty impressive machine learning, using advanced computer vision algorithms so you can frame the image perfectly for the number of participants. This all happens automatically the user doesn’t have to mess around with pan/tilt frames or a remote control”
There are also a host of other features enabled. We previewed the solution first hand at EC 2018 and it does appear that the Dolby Voice Room will remedy a lot of the usual issues which have plagued conferencing solutions in the past, saving time for teams and improving the experience overall.
Dolby have also carefully selected partners who will incorporate the solution within their portfolio. Dolby Voice Room is expected to be available later this year to BlueJeans and Highfive customers.
“The partnerships are really important because we need our technologies to be delivered in a workflow that makes sense and that people will enjoy using”
We certainly enjoyed our little taster of the solution last week so look forward to seeing it action on customer sites in the future.
