Live From ISE 2024 | Microsoft Teams and Shure live from the Shure Booth
ISE 2024 has come and gone, and as usual, the event was jam-packed with product unveilings, elaborate booths, and interviews featuring teams from across the industry. One such interview featured Michel Bouman and Jimmy Vaughan of Microsoft Teams-based podcast Teams and Rooms Tech Talk conducted a discussion with Microsoft Australia’s Andrew Higgs centered around Shure and Microsoft Teams’ partnership, technology, and the future of the industry.
Video Highlights
The Importance Of Audio
While video conferencing has provided a huge step forward in remote communications thanks to the addition of the video element, the truth is that audio is the truly essential aspect of the conferencing experience. Without audio, you cannot convey essential information, which means that high-quality audio is essential for a successful conference system in rooms large or small.
Shure’s lineup of high-quality audio solutions provides both installers and users with the ideal experience. Installation is simplified and streamlined, with many solutions providing onboard tools that allow installers to visualize the audio quality and pickup within a space and automatically integrate each end unit with another, and users are provided with an effortless, high-quality meeting audio solution.
Intelligent Audio and Meeting Equity
One of the major problems the industry has had to contend with is the concept of meeting equity. Meeting equity can be described as the ability for every voice to be heard clearly in a conference call, regardless of the speaker’s position within a room or whether they are local or remote.
To these ends, Shure is one of the companies at the forefront of developing technological solutions to this long-term problem. One such technological solution, intelligent audio, is promising to allow conference systems to automatically detect who is speaking within a room and adjust the visual-audio technology to focus on that speaker through a process called camera tracking.
By working with technology partners like Q-SYS, installers, DMRs, VARs, MSPs and in-house IT teams can program their video system to track speakers based on location. With advances in AI-based software suites in-camera, cameras will also be able to work with Shure devices to identify who is speaking and focus on that participant.
Room Accessibility and Ceiling Microphones
Critical to the success of any meeting room is making sure that anyone can walk into a room and retain their identity. Microsoft Teams and Shure’s lineup of conferencing audio equipment can help make sure that users are heard without needing to change how they speak or act.
A key aspect to this is the incorporation of ceiling microphones, such as the Shure MXA902, MXA920, and Stem Ceiling. Ceiling microphones are a powerful tool for integrators, as they drastically reduce deployment times and effort involved in integrating a room, and their wide pickup zones and onboard technology make them an unobtrusive yet effective means of picking up audio during a call.
Audio Ecosystems and Scalable Audio
As powerful a tool ceiling microphones can be, there is no one-size-fits-all option when it comes to creating an effective conferencing system. Some environments are noisier or are large enough to require multiple endpoints.
Part of what makes Shure solutions so unique is their scalability. Solutions like the MXA Ecosystem and Stem Ecosystems allow a customizable audio mix that can quickly and easily scale to fit each room’s individual needs. Devices can be easily added or removed to accommodate the needs of the day or the room in general.
Leveraging VR In Designing A Conference System
VR technology isn’t just useful for playing games or watching movies. VR technology is being used by some of Shure’s integrator partners to help design and showcase conference audio systems to their customer base.
Using the VR system, you can digitally insert audio devices into the real-world space and then visualize the audio pickup and output ranges for each device. This essentially creates a 3D audio heatmap that lets you know what devices will be needed to adequately cover a space and eliminate any possible dead zones, leading to an even more seamless and equitable meeting experience.
Integrating AI To Eliminate Audio Disruptions
While many are familiar with quiet microphones that have inadequate gain, the other end of the spectrum can have its own problems. In years past, many ceiling microphones have had the problem of picking up all audio within its range, including extraneous noises like flipping papers, fidgeting fingers, and doors opening or closing.
Microsoft Teams is working on an AI-based system that will be integrated with partners like Shure’s audio endpoints to help identify and differentiate voices from outside noises. Once voice data has been identified, the AI system can help exclude those extraneous noises and isolate the speaker’s voice, leading to a cleaner audio experience free from disruption.
Hungry for more? Watch the full video here or learn more about how Shure is working to be on the forefront of AI and other technological integration here!
