The most critical element in business telephony is intelligibility: the degree to which speech is understood. Understanding speech requires that we hear it clearly. Our minds are good at trying to compensate for missing words and blurred sounds, but the more time our brains spend in figuring out what might have been said, the less efficient and more prone to error our conversations become. Therefore, it is vital that the physical “what we hear” stage be as clear and as accurate as possible.

There are five aspects of speech audio that work together to make or break a clear, understandable conversation: bandwidth, reverberation, amplitude, interactivity, and noise. The job of any conferencing system is to tune and balance these aspects automatically to provide the best possible hearing experience for the parties on both ends of the call. You can remember these five characteristics by their first letters, which form the word BRAIN.

Meeteasy’s new generation of conference phones and speakerphone, developed through the past decade, implements numerous improvements, but they all focus on enhancing performance of the BRAIN model. Here are a few of the most important changes to be found in recent models.

HD Voice technology—The new MVOICE speakerphone series combine wideband audio with unique acoustic technology and system design to deliver amazing clarity that makes it seem as if you are in the same room as those on the other end of the call. Once you have experienced this breakthrough technology, you will never want to return to ordinary telephone calls.

Suppressing unwanted pickup—With this capability, which is one important component of Meeteasy’s integrated gain management, a conference phone will eliminate pickup from microphones that are not being used and continuously adapt this behavior as the meeting progresses. This cuts down substantially on room echo and noise and delivers much clearer speech to the listeners

Point the microphones at the talkers—Directional microphones discard most of the noise and echo that comes from behind them. While some tabletop systems achieve lower prices using less-expensive “omni- directional” (non-directional) microphones, they also pick up all of the room noise and room echo the entire time, which is extremely distracting and makes it hard to understand what is being said. Such systems should be avoided.

Interaction—Full-duplex technology lets participants speak at the same time without cutting off one another, which ensures that participants interact as naturally as possible. Without full duplex sound, participants will end up talking over each other and interrupting the flow of the meeting. All conference phone systems should be thoroughly tested for effective and seamless full-duplex performance. To test this capability, simply turn up the volume to maximum at both ends of the call while both parties are talking. A conference phone with good full-duplex technology will enable the talkers at both ends to be heard clearly

Versatile interconnection abilities—Today’s enterprise-grade systems include much more flexible audio input and output capabilities, enabling the connection of external recording and speaker systems, external lapel or podium microphones, extended microphones, and even integrated operation with an installed room system.