Motorola patents technology to clear up conference calls

For those of you trapped in a dreadful cubicle all day, you're probably more than familiar with the ever-popular conference calls that involve everyone and their mother-in-law trying to communicate at the same time. While the effectiveness of these chaotic gatherings are essentially nil, Motorola is hoping to clarify things, literally. The company has recently filed a patent to augment callers' voices so each individual sounds "distinctly different." The idea here is to use technology often found in recording studios, which adjusts the pitch of a singer's voice in order to disguise their inability sing on key, so to speak. Each caller would chat aimlessly for a few moments before getting down to the nitty gritty, so the Motorola magic could "determine a pitch contour for each individual voice signal," and if two or more folks sounded eerily similar, it would "shift [the voice] to one of approximately five semitones" in order to solve the confusion. Once the caller had the shift put on them, they'd blabber a moment more so the software could ensure the change was indeed effective -- and after all the voices have been given a tone of their own, you can supposedly identify your colleagues with ease. While this plan sounds admirable, and may solve a few embarrassing mixups while on the speakerphone, we just have to wonder which unlucky chaps would end up Alvin the Chipmunk and Bobby Baritone.

[Via Textually]

[Sam Jackson @ Aug 18th 2006 9:50AM]

I find that having people on the conference call who are using cell phones is much more annoying. Especially when it's someone who can't figure out how to mute it and everyone has to listen to their wind noise the entire call.

[Jim @ Aug 18th 2006 9:53PM]

This is retarted, I'm so looking forward to a conference call where people don't sound like themselves so I can't recognize their voices.

How about they just use something like Cisco's (i think) meeting software where they log into the web site and the software is aware of who is talking on what line and identifies them. Pretty cool stuff.