Technology - Google News

Microsoft Teams now uses AI to improve echo, interruptions, and acoustics - The Verge

Posted: 13 Jun 2022 06:00 AM PDT

Microsoft has spent the past two years adding flashy new productivity features to Teams, and now the company is overhauling how the fundamentals work thanks to AI. We've all been on a call where someone has poor room acoustics making it hard to hear them, or seen two people try to talk at the same time creating an awkward "no, you go ahead" moment. Microsoft's new AI-powered voice quality improvements should improve or even eliminate these day-to-day annoyances.

Microsoft is now using a machine learning models to improve room acoustics so you'll no longer sound like you're hiding in a cave. "While we have been trying our best with digital signal processing to do a really good job in Teams, we have now started using machine learning for the first time to build echo cancellation where you can truly reduce echo from all the different devices," explains Robert Aichner, a principal program manager for intelligent conversation and communications cloud at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge.

Microsoft has been testing this for months, measuring its models in the real world to ensure Teams users are noticing the echo reduction and improvements in call quality. The software maker used 30,000 hours of speech to help train its models, and captured thousands of devices through crowd sourcing where Teams users are paid to record their voice and playback audio from their device.

"We also simulate about 100,000 different rooms... the room acoustics play a big role in echo cancellation," says Aichner. The result is big improvements in call audio quality, and an elimination of echo that also allows multiple people to speak at the same time. You can see all of the improvements in action in the video above.

If Teams detects sound is bouncing or reverberating in a room resulting in shallow audio, the model will also convert captured audio and process it to make it sound like Teams participants are speaking into a close-range microphone instead of an echoey mess.

The most impressive part is the ability for people to interrupt each other on Teams calls now, without the awkward overlap where you can't hear the other person due to the echo. Microsoft is now shipping all this work in Teams, alongside the improvements it has made with AI-based noise suppression previously. All of the processing is done locally on client devices, instead of the cloud.

"We said we want to do it on the client, because the cloud is still expensive if you want to do every call processed in the cloud... and obviously we'd have to pass that cost onto the customer," explains Aichner. That would mean potentially restricting these important Teams improvements to paying customers, and the on-device route means features like noise suppression are available on 90 percent of devices using Teams.

All of these new Microsoft Teams improvements are now live, alongside some real-time screen optimizations for text in videos and AI-based improvements to bandwidth constraints during video or screen-sharing calls.

Adblock test (Why?)

Diablo 4 microtransactions won’t be like Diablo Immortal, Blizzard says - Polygon

Posted: 13 Jun 2022 09:30 AM PDT

For those worried about what and how much Diablo 4 will cost, a Blizzard Entertainment community lead said on Sunday it will be nothing like the rather … aggressive monetization behind Diablo Immortal, which launched two weeks ago.

Diablo 4, which will launch sometime in 2023, will be a "full price game built strictly for PC/console audiences," Blizzard's Adam Fletcher wrote on Twitter. Additional monetization will come from "optional cosmetic items & eventually full expansions."

In other words, somewhat like Diablo 3, which got one $40 expansion in 2014 (Reaper of Souls) that was followed by a $15 premium DLC pack, in 2017, that brought back the Necromancer class from Diablo 2. Diablo 3 did not have paid cosmetics.

Still, Diablo 4 sounds like a far cry from the business model of Diablo Immortal, a game primarily designed for mobile devices but which also launched (in beta) on Windows PC on June 2. That game is free-to-play, though the ability to use real money to purchase character progression — particularly endgame progression — has rankled many fans as a pay-to-win game. Last week, YouTube's Bellular News estimated that it would take 10 years or cost $110,000 for players to acquire enough "Legendary Gems" to fully maximize their character and its build.

Already, the wary fans of the Diablo subreddit are bracing for a battle pass in Diablo 4, which Fletcher didn't mention, but which many say they don't want. Battle passes typically award cosmetics and other items as players move through the XP tiers — progression folks can advance or skip with a premium purchase of the pass or a number of levels in it.

And as far as the premium cosmetic model that Fletcher proposed on Sunday, others are suspicious of that, too. "'Its not P2W, it's just P2LookGood' concept should NOT be normalized in the genre where the character customization and loot are the major parts of the gameplay," said one commenter.

Adblock test (Why?)