14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft continues work on its Skype VoIP platform, so today the company has introduced a new version of the application for Windows desktop, that comes with significant improvements in terms of the audio quality during calls.
The company says that this new pack of enhancements should be available on all platforms out there and not only on Windows desktop, so no matter if you use Skype on the desktop, Mac OS X, iPhone, or Windows Phone, the audio quality should be excellent to say the least.
According to Microsoft itself, when using the latest version of Skype, you’ll be able to “have high quality audio no matter what kind of noise environment you’re in – an airport, train station, shopping mall, rock show or concert hall.”
Microsoft then goes on to say that all these improvements are mostly visible on Lumia phones, where Skype already comes with advanced audio processing technology providing crystal clear sound when talking with your contacts.
Using all available microphones for better audio quality
Microsoft explains that the new technology implemented in Skype makes use of all available microphones to reduce noise and thus improve the quality of the sound.
“Audio signal processing over mobile devices is getting more sophisticated all the time. We can therefore leverage the audio capabilities that have been optimized for a specific device’s acoustics,” says Sriram Srinivasan, senior program manager, Audio Digital Signal Processing.
“Several Lumia phones, for example, have multiple microphones, and what we do is work with the Lumia team to make sure those devices’ capabilities are perfectly aligned with what we want Skype to do.”
The best example is offered with the help of a Lumia phone, which can use signals from all microphones and with the help of the smart processing technology in case puts the focus on your voice and reduces or even cancels background noise.
More such improvements on their way
Microsoft says that this new batch of improvements for Skype is just the beginning of a much more important rollout that would include many other releases.
Again, Lumia phones are offered as living proof that things are heading in the right direction for Skype and more improvements are very likely to be released very soon.
“This is a mobile-first, cloud-first world; it is becoming the industry standard to release updates with this frequency, and to ask users to maintain the most updated versions of software. But the benefits are significant – look at the work we’re doing with Nokia Lumia phones – and there will be further improvements to come,” Karlheinz Wurm, partner product manager for Skype real-time communications, says.
If you’d like to try out the new improvements released today, go ahead and download Skype 6.20 for Windows desktop right now.