One of the benefits of cellphones is that they allow you to make calls from anywhere you can get a signal. One of the downsides of that freedom is that you often find yourself calling from noisy environments such as sidewalks bathed in traffic.
Now, a small Silicon Valley start-up company called Aliph has come up with a solution: a new cellphone headset that suppresses background noise dramatically so that your voice comes through loud and clear even in clamorous settings.
This new “adaptive” headset, called Jawbone, is offered for $150 at the company’s Web site, www.jawbone.com. In its first incarnation, it works with many, but not all, phones from Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Versions for other phones are in the works.
Aliph’s Jawbone technology, which grew out of research the company did for the Pentagon, relies on two kinds of microphones. Standard microphones transmit your speech and detect background noise. A special contact microphone, which rests against your cheek, uses vibrations in your bones to determine exactly when you are speaking.
This latter mike, which Aliph calls a “voice activity sensor,” allows the Jawbone headset to distinguish your voice more accurately than most headsets.
Like many other acoustic systems, the Jawbone includes special chips and software that attempt to enhance voice frequencies and reduce background frequencies. But because the contact microphone lets the device know precisely when you are speaking, it is able to apply these digital filters more efficiently and successfully.
A few months back, Aliph unveiled the Jawbone with a dramatic live demonstration. Company officials showed the device suppressing the noise of a boombox, a blender and a weed whacker only a couple of feet from a phone. But over the past few days, I have been testing it myself in more real-world conditions.
Using a Sony Ericsson T610 phone on the AT&T network, I have tested the Jawbone in an airport; in a plane on the tarmac; in a car with an open window cruising down a freeway; and in the presence of rock music cranked up all the way.
Because the Jawbone control unit has a switch that turns its noise-suppression technology on and off, I was able to run comparison tests on every call and confirm that Jawbone made a big difference. In every case, the people I was calling reported a sharp decrease in background noise and a sharp increase in the volume and clarity of my voice. Jawbone also improved the quality of the incoming audio.
At Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., the sounds of a moving sidewalk, other people and constant announcements nearly drowned out my voice. But when I turned the Jawbone on, those noises were reduced to a dim background hum. In a taxi on a San Diego freeway, with the window cracked open a few inches, the road noise and wind were a big distraction, but they faded to almost nothing when I turned on the Jawbone.
The only situation where the Jawbone wasn’t as impressive was in the plane on the tarmac, with people streaming down the aisle, flight attendants making announcements, and the blower overhead blasting air onto my face. In that case, the Jawbone did cut the noise, but the air from the blower still created a sort of staticlike sound that made the call very annoying to the person I had dialed.
There was one big problem. On most of my test calls the people on the other end reported an echo effect – they could hear their own voice echoing back at them. I didn’t hear this, but it’s obviously a major annoyance. Aliph says this isn’t common and speculates that it might be caused by the phone or network rather than the Jawbone. But when I removed the Jawbone and just used the phone normally, the echo went away. If this is a common issue with the headset, it will have to be fixed.
There are some other downsides to the Jawbone. The two-part design can make you feel as though you’re wrapped in wires – from the phone to the control unit and from the control unit to the earpiece. Aliph says it is working on a wireless version, but for now the wires are a problem.
Worse, the earpiece was uncomfortable, and I doubt I could wear it every day for long periods. You might have a different reaction.
I don’t recommend the Jawbone for every person in every situation. But if you are comfortable with headsets and often find your cellphone calls disrupted by noisy environments, the Jawbone could be a huge help.
Walter Mossberg writes about personal technology for the Wall Street Journal.
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