Jawbone, baby

Walt Mossberg writes of a powerful new headset for cellphones

WSJ.com - Personal Technology:

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 the most clamorous settings.


This new "adaptive" headset, called Jawbone, goes on sale for $150 starting today 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 from background noises much more accurately than a normal cellphone headset can.


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.