Voice communication is one of the most frequently overlooked features that can make or break an app. There’s many serious issues such as sound distortion, echo, background noise, and interference from other sources that impact the way we work every single day.
In fact, people who work in noisy environments often face unique challenges related to their spoken communication. When designing new apps, it’s important to keep all of these in your development plan.
This article will feature common voice communication issues that teams encounter and how to mitigate them through the new SDKs built by Krisp.
Voice matters everywhere
Prior to the pandemic and right through to today, voice communications exploded in usage across a plethora of devices, platforms and applications.
As our world has been physically separated over the past two years, our need to feel connected to one another has grown exponentially. Today, we have even more team communication applications. And more and more of the options we use are incorporating voice and video as a must, ensuring the quality of our calls.
Voice communication is fundamental to feeling connected, as is video. It is why team communication apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and others exploded during the pandemic. They made it easy for people to connect, see, and hear each other in spite of the distance.
As humans, we need to hear other people’s voices to feel connected. Our desire to hear others talk doesn’t stop with two-way calls. The audio-only app, Clubhouse, allows users to listen to audio talks in different virtual rooms. That’s why it’s been described as “a mashup of listening to a podcast while scrolling through your Twitter feed and attending a conference remotely.”
So naturally, we need and rely on voices and sounds to communicate, whether we’re the ones starting a discussion or not.
Voice communication beyond clear conversations
Voice communication comes with many benefits, including:
- Reducing miscommunication between consumers and businesses
- Providing a noise cancellation filter in noisy environments
- Preventing employee back-and-forths in order to speed up work
- Helping you impress clients and prevent noise complaints
- Improving the quality of our voice and removing misunderstandings.
Voice provides context and clarity
Think about how painstaking it can be trying to make sure that your text-only communication has the right context. Should I add an emoji or an exclamation point? We can easily differentiate between sincerity and humor in a call, whereas doing so through text or chat can be problematic. In a business environment, context can be a difference-maker in support, service, and sales.
But ensuring clear conversations isn’t the only benefit to keep in mind for your software.
Voice enables better customer experiences
Voice conversations are crucial for consumer businesses because they help reduce transaction time and provide an easier experience for customers. Parties can quickly establish a personal connection to get small tasks done quickly over a voice call, from telling the delivery person how to find the back door or confirming your medical data with a healthcare professional.
Brief voice calls in times of emergency can help us move faster and be more productive and efficient in our daily tasks. Many companies offer live chat and even face-to-face calls as a primary point of contact. These are useful both for handling easy-to-answer questions and use cases.
These text chats are typically everyone’s first choice for a quick resolution, be they accessible via a website or social media support. But the ability to escalate to a brief call is invaluable and can help avoid exchanging hundreds of messages and mounting frustration on both sides.
Once a customer can easily opt for an audio call with a support representative to ask how to get their new gadget working in real-time, the ease of communication is worth its weight in gold from a customer experience perspective.
All apps must render good voice quality
Think about the last time you were on a call but the connection was just so bad and you really need to get something fixed quickly. Or when echoes or loud background noises prevented you from hearing an important question or explanation.
These audio issues can make voice calls unusable and frustrating for everyone involved. But adding voice to applications and platforms is not as easy as just integrating WebRTC. Ensuring a high-quality voice experience requires good audio design and integration of top-tier voice processing systems. The latter should be able to eliminate background noise, remove room echo, and fix acoustic echo problems so that the resulting voice is crystal clear.
This entire process needs to be done in real-time without imposing a load on the application or device. Otherwise, the entire user experience within any app would be ruined. The audacity to enhance voice quality is paramount in today’s world of voice communication apps, as it can mitigate issues like sound distortion, background noise, and interference, ultimately ensuring clear conversations.
Enter Krisp Audio SDKs
Krisp Voice SDKs provide the world’s best noise cancellation and echo removal. Our SDKs are C++ libraries for integration in Windows, Mac, and Linux for desktop applications, iOS and Android for mobile applications, and WebAssembly Javascript for browser-based applications.
Krisp will also provide you access to our voice activity detection (VAD) and noise level detector (NLD) technologies for integration with our voice SDKs.
Today, Krisp SDKs are processing more than 80 billion minutes per month, demonstrating their robustness across devices, headsets, and languages. Some of the leading communication application and platform providers have integrated Krisp, including Discord, RingCentral Video, and Twilio Video.
With the expansion of Krisp SDKs across the market, companies are building new integrations across many different types of platforms and applications. Hybrid offices, the metaverse, virtual contact centers, remote conferencing, and healthcare are just some of the hundreds of applications actively integrating voice communications into their products.
Next steps for integrating Krisp’s SDKs functionality with your own platform
Incorporating in-app voice calls into applications and platforms makes it easy for users to engage with the click of a button. Krisp’s Voice SDK makes it possible for you to integrate high-quality in-app calls quickly with minimal effort and resources.
Our Voice SDK allows for rapid time to market so you won’t miss out on your higher customer engagement potential. Adding in-app high-quality voice features to your existing apps shouldn’t take months to do. You can get Krisp Voice SDK integrated in a matter of days using our evaluation SDKs, documentation, and active support.
Learn more about Krisp Audio SDKs.
