WE ALL LOVE being heard, it helps us generate a feeling of self worth and know that other people are out there that want to listen to what we have to say. As such, having to shout over the noise of the world and repeat ourselves undermines our own ego, or at least this is what my shrink tells me. Amateur psychology out of the way, a privately held company called Solicall has released a beta version of a product that eliminates or at least reduces all the background noise pollution in real time during VoIP (Voice over IP) calls on your PC. The graph below comes from Solicall's demo and shows a graph of the sound of a demo call without and with using Solicall.

Demo shows what the software is capable of

Installation is much the same as any other software, you download the 1.18MB install file, double click it and away you go. The install screens do look very primitive, but they get the job done so I guess you can't really knock it. About the only thing that's even vaguely noteworthy about the install is that you probably get a warning from Windows about the driver being uncertified, this is because the program is still in its beta version so it has not yet been cleared by the techvoles.

Rather Spartan looking install

Once installed you'll find a new icon on the taskbar, as per usual double clicking the icon will open the Solicall interface and right clicking it will bring up a context menu to select most of the options. You'll need to reconfigure any VoIP programs with which you want to use Solicall, this is a simple process of resetting the input and output sound devices to the virtual 'Solicall Audio Device' that is created during the installation. The website has a pretty thorough explanation of how to this along with pictures for most of the well known VoIP programs. It's also worth noting that you can in fact use Solicall for any sound input / output program, such as the sound recorder or other programs like TeamSpeak, it's just a matter of finding the setting which tells the program which audio device to use.

Resetting Skype's audio devices

The other useful feature that Solicall offers is the ability to automatically record any conversation which can be useful for business sorts who need to playback conference calls to create notes or INQ hacks to record incriminating calls for later use as blackmail. These recordings are done in stereo with each side of the conversation saved to different channel.

Rather spartan looking install

The software works out the box, but works better if you configure individual speakers for each person who uses the software. This is a very simple process that takes about a minute and helps the software to distinguish your voice from any unwanted background noise. There is also a real-time audio graph that you can watch to see exactly how the program is modulating the audio streams, but this is rather gimmicky and I doubt many people will be using this much.

Real time graphs

I was pleasantly surprised as to how well Solicall actually worked, I was expecting some improvements but it did a much better job than I had anticipated. As in the case of devices like noise-cancelling headphones I was expecting it to be effective against constant sounds like fans or passing cars, but not very good at dealing with short sharp sounds, but rather I found it did a good job against a wide variety of annoying sounds including barking dogs and having the TV on. The best sound elimination was with constant noises which were eliminated completely, but almost all other background noise was at least dampened considerably if not completely removed.

One problem is that it can leave your voice sounding somewhat tinny, which may not be great for you but it could be a great idea for telemarketing drones as it will help make them clearer as they deliver their sales pitch and, if they've enabled the 'Screen Incoming' option it'll dampen the sound of the receiver being slammed back into its cradle. Speaking of the 'Screen Incoming' option, which lets Solicall monitor incoming sound and adjust it in the same way, almost as if the other person also had the program installed, unfortunately I found this had very mixed results and often made the other person even harder to hear as the output was very choppy.

Another odd thing is that the memory footprint fluctuates quite a lot, swinging from as low as 432K to over 11MB on occasion, while this isn't going to affect most PCs older low specced machines may have some issues with this.

As mentioned earlier Solicall's primary function relates to VoIP applications, but you can use it with just about any program that utilises voice, including voice recognition. I tried it out with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and was pleased to notice an immediate improvement in the accuracy while dictating a note as Solicall reduced the background noise that can confuse voice recognition software.

In Short
If you use voice enabled applications such as Skype or MSN and you ever find yourself in a noisy environment I can highly recommend Solicall. It's still in the beta phase so you may have some issues, but especially as it's a free, quick download and performs well it's strikes me as something of a no-brainer.

The Good
Does its job well

The Bad
Screen Incoming audio results very inconsistent
Can leave your voice sounding metallic

The Ugly
Interface is not very polished

Bartender's Report
Four of out Five Pints