Prototype

AS Audio Enhancer

What if…

we had a tool which automatically enhanced audio quality with speech isolation, sibilance reduction, high pass filter, noise reduction, dynamic range control and intelligent dialog detection?

Problem

Great audio software is usually complex to use and very expensive. That’s why audio solutions are usually interconnected with consultants and sales and large scale contracts.

Solution

We picked the recently released dolby.io API which promises powerful audio enhancements via a simple to use API for a reasonable price. So we built a tool to test this. Our idea was to create an automatic transcription of file with hard to understand speakers, enhance this file and create another transcription for comparison.

Challenges

The API was indeed easy to use. The biggest challenge was to automate the complete track from file upload to enhancement to transcription to a frontend for comparison in one week. We did it even though there was not enough time to polish the layout. The experiment of increasing accuracy of automatic transcription failed though. We did not find any samples where the transcription worked significantly better after the enhancement than before. But the enhancement of the overall audio quality was very obvious to hear for the human ear. Especially noise reduction made a huge difference in the samples.

You can test the prototype here: AS Audio Enhancer