Google Cloud acquires Limes Audio to improve audio in Hangouts, Chromebox for Meetings

With enterprise products and services taking an ever bigger priority at Google, the number of partnerships and purchases have increased. With the acquisition of Limes Audio, Google hopes to improve the audio experience in Hangouts video conferencing and Chromebox for Meetings.

Founded in 2007, the Swedish company has focused on pushing the “limits of speech enhancement” to “provide the world’s best audio conferencing experience.” This has resulted in a two-way ‘TrueVoice’ communication audio processing software that gets rid of echos, enhances speech, suppresses background noise, and improves perceived audio quality.

This Acoustic Echo Cancellation software can work with just one microphone or up to 12, with the company offering several reference designs of hardware that takes advantage of TrueVoice.

In addition to software, Limes Audio also offers product development services to make custom hardware for customers, as well as design and engineering services and product benchmarking.

Google notes that the acquisition was due to the increase in businesses adopting video conferencing solutions like Chromebox for Meetings and Google Hangouts. Conference rooms with different shapes and sizes prove an acoustic challenge as does poor internet connection.

The Limes Audio team will be working closely with those groups “to introduce new solutions that offer our customers the best online voice quality on the market.” Hopefully, those enhancements will trickle down to the more consumer facing version of Hangouts in the near future.