Dolby Voice

Dolby Voice on the Dolby.io Communications APIs Platform

Dolby Voice is an award-winning audio communications technology. With Dolby Voice, Dolby has applied its expertise in sight and sound signal processing and compression technologies to provide improvements in voice quality and clarity that make virtual meetings more natural and productive. The benefits of Dolby Voice are:

  • Advanced audio processing features such as:
    • Dynamic audio leveling
    • Advanced spatial chat
    • Noise and echo reduction
  • Optimized bandwidth utilization
  • Advanced network resilience to help maintain good audio quality in challenging network conditions

Additionally, Dolby Voice allows using the Dolby Voice Codec (DVC), which offers:

  • Improved audio processing
  • Improved audio quality
  • Increased conference capacity from 50 users to 250 users in audio-only conferences.

The Web SDK supports the DVC codec only on Chrome and Edge on desktop operating systems. On other browsers and mobile operating systems, the SDK uses Opus. The C++ SDK supports DVC only on Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows. On Linux, the SDK uses Opus.

By default, Client SDKs create Dolby Voice conferences. To create a non-Dolby Voice conference, set a dolbyVoice parameter to false while creating a new conference.

Dolby Voice vs. Non-Dolby Voice modes

With Dolby Voice, the Communications APIs platform introduces a new way of managing audio streams between clients and the platform. The server mixes all received audio streams and transmits only one audio stream to each participant. The platform continues to support unmixed audio streams and creating conferences in the traditional audio processing mode. The following diagram outlines the differences in communication between Dolby Voice and non-Dolby Voice mode:

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This graphic illustrates the difference between a non-Dolby Voice and Dolby Voice conference

The following table shows the difference in audio streams transmission between non-Dolby Voice mode and Dolby Voice mode:

Direction Non-Dolby Voice conference Dolby Voice conference
Uplink Single stereo Opus stream Single mono Dolby Voice Codec (DVC) stream
Downlink Multiple stereo Opus streams Single multi-channel Dolby Voice Codec (DVC) stream

The Web SDK offers stereo by default. The stream can be updated to mono using JoinOptions. The Web SDK supports DVC streams only on Chrome and Edge on desktop operating systems. On other browsers and mobile operating systems, the SDK uses a single mono Opus stream for uplink transmission and a single stereo Opus stream for downlink transmission.

The C++ SDK supportsDVC streams only on Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows. On Linux, the SDK uses a single mono Opus stream for uplink transmission and a single stereo Opus stream for downlink transmission.