Pearce, Canberra, Australia – March 15, 2005 – Ergonomics by Design, Ltd. often uses Sony digital recorders to record meetings and interviews in varying conference rooms without very much notice as to when the discussions would start. Handheld recorders were initially chosen since they are extremely portable. The only difficulty was the handheld recorder’s limited pickup range; the rooms were large and the number of attendees would vary in every meeting. The Voice Tracker™, used as an auxiliary microphone through the 3.5 mm jack on the handheld digital recorder, provided an ideal solution for this application due to its light weight, its portability and its immense recording range.
According to Wendy Elford, Director of Ergonomics by Design, Ltd. “The Voice Tracker™ array microphone performed brilliantly. We used it with a Sony ICD-BM1 and also on the laptop using the Microsoft sound recorder. With the Voice Tracker™ we were able to catch speakers up to 6 m away. Our tests gave excellent quality around a large conference table in a room approximately 5 m x 8 m.”
Karl Francois, National Solutions Manager with Voice Perfect Systems, who worked with Ergonomics by Design, Ltd. on this application, observed: “The Voice Tracker™ array microphone performed equally well with laptop based meeting recording software, offered by Lexacom and others”.
Bob Feingold, CEO of Acoustic Magic notes that “The Voice Tracker™ is a simple and cost effective alternative to installing an expensive sound system with a separate microphone for each person”.
The Voice Tracker™ locates a talker and electronically steers a “listening beam,” like an acoustic searchlight, in that direction. This creates spatial filtering; sounds and reverberation from other parts of the room are not picked up. In addition, digital noise reduction processing removes background noise. This two-stage noise reduction, coupled with the sensitivity of eight microphone elements, gives the Voice Tracker™ outstanding range and sound quality.
About Voice Perfect Systems. Voice Perfect Systems is a 100% Australian owned company, formed in early 1994 to address the growing interest for large vocabulary speech dictation for computer users. Recognizing the potential for speech recognition systems, Voice Perfect became one of the pioneering distributors of speech activated dictation software. For additional information, visit www.voiceperfect.com or contact Karl Francois (karl.francois@voiceperfect.com).
About Acoustic Magic, Inc. Acoustic Magic, Inc., located near Boston, manufactures the Voice Tracker™ desktop microphone that has found application in speech recognition, meeting and transcription recording, VoIP and conventional teleconferencing, voice control for home automation, and security surveillance. The Voice Tracker™ Array microphone has been Certified by Dragon and ViaVoice speech recognition software, HomeSeer and HAL Home Automation software, as well as WinScribe dictation recording software. For additional information, www.Acoustic Magic.com or Contact Us Here.
About Ergonomics by Design, Ltd. Ergonomics by Design Pty Ltd is an ergonomics consultancy formed in 2002 to assist organisations and individuals to profit through the use of education and best practice standards in human factors and ergonomics. For additional Information, see www.ergodesign.com.au
