Smartphones are increasingly becoming our AI-powered assistants, but their voice call quality has barely changed in years. Well, Nokia wants to fix that – and it’s claiming to have made the “world’s first immersive voice and audio call” using a new codec.
The phone call was made using a new IVAS (Immersive Voice and Audio Services) codec, which is part of the incoming ‘5G Advanced’ standard. According to Nokia’s blog post, the codec creates a “three-dimensional sound experience” that makes chats feel “more lifelike and engaging”.
In theory, it should be a big upgrade from today’s compressed, monophonic phone calls, which haven’t improved a great deal over the years despite the introduction of software-based features such as Voice Isolation.
So, when might the rest of us get this voice calling upgrade? There’s a good news and bad news. According to Reuters, the tech only needs a smartphone to have at least two microphones in order to be compatible, and that’s the case with most of today’s best phones.
Unfortunately, the 5G Advanced standard – expected to be the successor to today’s 5G cellular tech – isn’t expected to be fully rolled out for a few years, and the IVAS codec isn’t yet used by any mobile networks.
Still, this first so-called “immersive” phone call should get the ball rolling on the licensing agreements needed to get make our voice calls a little less muddy-sounding and ready for “enhanced extended reality and metaverse applications” that Nokia says it has its eye on.
Nokia and its 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) partners, who have co-developed the new IVAS codec, clearly don’t envisage it being solely for smartphones and audio calls.
On the 3GPP site, some of the use cases include “multi-stream teleconferencing, XR conversational services, and user-generated live and pre-produced content streaming”, alongside more conversational phone calls. It also sees “corresponding applications in the AR/MR space”.
In other words, this is about taking voice calls (and conference calls) into a more spatial, realistic future where it genuinely feels like we’re in the presence of other people, rather than talking to them through a compressed format from a bygone age.
It’s going to take a few years for the IVAS codec to be licensed and fully adopted by mobile carriers, but by then we should have a more fully developed mixed-reality space thanks to the arrival of more headsets on the lines of the Apple Vision Pro and Samsung XR/VR headset, plus some corresponding apps.
But an improvement to voice call quality on our phones, which can still vary wildly between apps, would certainly be a very nice bonus.
