Wrap-up Session Conclusions for Session 5

1. Wrap-up SessionConclusions for Session 5 Session 5: Voice and audiovisual services Review of the ongoing standardization activities and technical issues and solutions to provide good (better) quality to the users Jean-Yves Monfort ITU-T FG CARCOM Vice-Chair, ETSI TC STQ Chair France Telecom Representative JYM.C.I.S

2. Highlights from Presentation 5.1“Speech communication in cars goes wideband- a new ITU-T FG CARCOM”(Hans.W. Gierlich, Head Acoustics GmbH) • Going to wideband creates new challenges • Delay • To provide superior noise cancellation • To provide superior echo cancellor • Quality in double talk • So, need to define criteria ensuring superior conversation performance • Need for collaborations between standardization bodies to ensure a global quality through different networks and terminals • Reach the goal of "Tandem Free Operation" (including all speech processing systems of the communication chain) • Develop/Implement protocols to avoid or at least reduce speech processing tandeming. • Anyone may join ITU-T FG Carcom • Next meeting: March 6th, 2009, Geneva

3. Highlights from Presentation 5.2“Car Active Noise Cancellation for improved car efficiency, From/In/To car voice communication and music listening experience” (J.P. Jallet, NXP semiconductors) • Car Active Noise Cancellation is able to reduce the low frequency car engine and road noise without car weight increase (by comparison with passive countermeasures). • Car Active Noise Cancellation brings additional benefits: • Car audio listening experience: de-masking of the music bass to restores a listening experience close to the one obtained in quiet/low noise environment. • Car hands-free voice communication: additional low frequency noise reduction on top of sending path noise reduction. • Car Active Noise Cancellation can ideally be integrated with the car audio and car hands-free voice communication systems.

4. Highlights from Presentation 5.3“Wideband Speech Communications : The good, The Bad and the Ugly” (Scott Pennock, QNX Software Systems) • The presentation shows the real benefits of Wideband speech in car, by comparison with Narrowband. • WB may also become a key differentiator. • But, to succeed it is needed to • Design fine vehicle platforms • implement high performance speech enhancement systems (AEC, NR,…) • Ensure fine interoperability between narrow and wideband speech

5. Highlights from Presentation 5.4“Automotive speech Enhancement of Today : applications, challenges and Solutions” (Tim Haulick, Harmann/Becker Automotive Systems GmbH) • Presents several implementations to enhance speech quality perceived by the users (inside the car and distant users) in driving situations • Bandwidth extension (from NBWB) • Speech reconstruction (reducing noise masking) • Association of beamformer and spatial postfilter (to improve speech recognition without significant impairement of speech quality) • Wind noise suppression (to reduce noise generated by fans) • In-car communications (subjective tests showing the improvement perceived by users) • The enhancements are presented through spectrograms, auditory samples an results of subjective tests

6. Highlights from Presentation 5.5“Innovative Strategies to Improve the Delivery of Telematics Voice Services” (Julien Masson, Connexis) • Presents a new approach for communications between drives and call centers • By combining speech recognition with human agents • By distributed call centers with work-at-home agents • Shows consequences of this approach on • The reduction of the time requesting the driver attention • The reduction of the cost associated to the service

7. Remarks • The first ITU-T Focus Group FITCAR produced a specification now approved as ITU-T as P.1100, for Handsfree terminals in narrow-band speech. • The new ITU-T Focus Group CARCOM is dedicated to Wideband speech (100Hz-7 kHz). Results expected by October 2009. • Moving from Narrow-band (NB) to Wideband (WB) is not only to increase the bandwidth but to ensure real better quality for the users, which include improvements in the whole communication chain including terminals. • Specific enhancements are needed for car environments, but these enhancements may also be needed for other situations. So, some specifications could be re-used in standards.

8. Conclusions / Recommendations (1/2) • FG CARCOM is a fine place to define requirements and test methods for terminals implementing speech signal processing to be used in noisy or adverse acoustic environments (eg Noise cancellation)  New Recommendation in ITU-T SG12 • Some results could also be useful for other types of terminals  need to disseminate results to other Standardization Bodies (eg ETSI STQ, 3GPP SA4) • The on-going work in SG16 on Voice enhancement (see session 3) will be very useful, specially for car communications to avoid/reduce speech processing tandeming and to provide relevant protocols to be used by networks and terminals.

9. Conclusions / Recommendations (2/2) • On-going wideband deployement but wideBand speech applications shall provide real superior speech quality, in order to satisfy users' expectations. • Importance to develop standards ensuring fine interoperability between Narrowband and Wideband, without reducing significantly the speech quality in Wideband (eg implementation of bandwidth extension applications). • Speech recognition. Few standards in this field; however, is there a need to develop specifications on acoustical interfaces and noise cancellation, to improve the performance of speech recognition?