The next big thing
in voice

Stefan Bruhn, Director, Audio, Strategy and Standards at Dolby Laboratories discusses the value of immersive audio.

The next big thing in voice

Immersive audio is the next generation of communication in consumer, enterprise and industrial applications. And in the latest episode of the Network Effect, Stefan Bruhn, Director, Audio, Strategy and Standards at Dolby Laboratories demos the technology and discusses its transformational abilities.

Taking a call in a crowded coffee shop or a noisy mall is an exercise in frustration. But what if you could snap your fingers and make every distracting sound vanish? Dolby, the audio pioneers behind the Dolby Atmos experience have an even better idea. They’re teaming up with Nokia and the standards group 3GPP to bring spatial audio directly to your smartphone. It’s called the IVAS codec, and it’s poised to transform our everyday communications.

Spatial audio isn’t new. We’ve seen it in music apps, where turning your head makes it seem like the band is still playing from a fixed point in the room. But Dolby’s partnership aims to take this technology beyond just a neat party trick, delivering immersive, three-dimensional audio to phone calls, video meetings, and even the metaverse.

While we’ve come to expect concert-hall quality when we fire up a movie or stream an album, we’ve somehow settled for tinny, one-dimensional voice calls. That’s about to change, and fast. Dolby’s Stefan Bruhn tells The Network Effect’s Michael Hainsworth that “Immersive voice and audio is such a big difference compared to today’s mono experiences that are available on mobile telephones.”

“We believe users are used to these better experiences,” says Bruhn, “and we see that unless we close this gap, it will keep growing.” The IVAS codec isn’t just about novelty—it’s about meeting rising consumer expectations. The result is a conference call experience that mimics sitting in the same room as your co-workers, or a metaverse interaction that sounds eerily like a face-to-face conversation.

For companies that adopt the technology early, it’ll be a key differentiator. But Bruhn predicts a future where everyone takes it for granted, adding that “there are many differentiation possibilities in terms of how you capture the immersive voice… more than just a commodity service.”

It’s a quantum leap in audio quality, and soon we’ll wonder how we ever tolerated anything less.