With the explosive growth of the open office environment, keeping noise and chatter under control when talking on the phone is critical for sounding professional and staying focused.  According to recent future of work research*, over 50% of office workers report office noise as a significant burden to their overall satisfaction and productivity.  And it goes further than that.  With all that noise going on within your own offices, have you ever stopped to think about the listeners on the “far side” of your telephone conversations?  Put yourself in the place of who you’re talking with: have you ever called into your bank to speak with an agent, only to be distracted by the sounds of their ringing phones and chatter in the background?  If only there was a solution… 😊

One of the pioneering features developed by Poly is called the “Acoustic Fence,” a way of preventing surrounding noise and conversation from derailing your conversations.

Here’s how it works

Unlike conventional devices that use their microphones the same way regardless of conditions, Acoustic Fence continuously explores the differences in sound between multiple microphones to find who is the main talker, and then selects, combines, and mutes the remaining ones to do the most targeted job of sending just the main talker’s conversation to the far-end listener.  The resulting impact is that the listener hears the talker without interruption; any background sounds are heard just in snippets that don’t connect to make another distracting dialog.  Background sounds and talking are sliced and blanked by the cadences of your own speaking, rendering your voice clear to the far end and nearby conversations incomprehensible.

While technology is not quite at the point that it can reliably filter one active voice from another in real time, by chopping up the distraction in this way Acoustic Fence takes advantage of the human’s built-in perceptual filter: if you can’t hear a whole phrase, you can’t make sense of it and won’t be distracted by it.  Poly combines Acoustic Fence with the natural performance of low-noise directional microphones and some very clever acoustic designs to deliver the most effective performance on the market.

What’s better, Acoustic Fence is not locked into a single performance level: it uses settings that can be changed by the system manager to match it to individual environments.

Poly is shipping Acoustic Fence in a growing number of its products today, including desktop phones and video systems.

To experience Acoustic Fence for yourself, talk with your Poly representative for a demonstration.

 

*Data from “All Your Employees Are Distracted.” April 24, 2019. Future Workplace.