Sun^TM Labs Voice Bridge

The Voice Bridge is versatile software that can be used in multiple contexts.

The Voice Bridge enhances 3D virtual environments such as MPK20: Sun's Virtual Workplace by providing individually adjustable audio channels for each live avatar and each in-world recorded sound source. Virtual world inhabitants experience life-like high-fidelity, stereo audio as they navigate through the environment.

The Voice Bridge is a scalable, SIP-based platform for setting up and managing conference calls. Calls can either be entirely VoIP or combined with calls routed through a PBX. The Voice Bridge manages conferences, allowing members to join or leave the conference. It is responsible for receiving and mixing speech and sending the mix out to each member of the conference. Speech detection is done by the Voice Bridge so individual speakers can be identified easily. Additionally, each caller can have his or her private mix of the conference. This supports a variety of features ranging from individual volume control to multiple, private voice chats within a single conference. The Voice Bridge has been in use internally at Sun since 2004 for conference calling as part of the Sun^TM Labs Meeting Suite prototype software.

The Voice Bridge can be used as a component to support telephony and audio features within enterprise applications. For example, the Voice Bridge can be used to add click calling to corporate directories or other web pages. It is also ideally suited to "web 2.0" style conference calling applications.

As part of the team's research effort, we are studying the benefits of high-fidelity, stereo audio. Audio samples and a paper describing an assessment of performance under different audio conditions can be found on our Audio Assessment page.