Research Collection: The Unseen History of Audio and Acoustics Research at Microsoft

Audio and Acoustics Research at Microsoft

Getting the sound right is a crucial ingredient in natural user interfaces, immersive gaming, realistic virtual and mixed reality, and ubiquitous computing. Audio also plays an important role in assistive technologies for people who are blind or have low vision, and speech recognition and processing can help support those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Although computers have been capable of playing and processing high-fidelity audio for many decades, there are many frontiers left to explore in computational recognition, analysis and rendering of sound for speech or immersive sound fields.

Audio has been a key research area since Microsoft Research was founded in 1991 – in its first year, researchers used audio data as well as other cues to explore automatic summarization of audiovisual presentations. Over the years, there have been steady and significant research advances in speech recognition, natural user interfaces, audio as a tool for collaboration and productivity, capturing and reproducing sound, spatial audio, acoustic simulation and audio analytics.

Many of these advances have shipped in Microsoft products and services like Windows 10, Kinect, HoloLens and Teams, as well as Ford’s SYNC in-car infotainment system, Polycom’s videoconferencing devices, and major game titles such as Gears of War, Sea of Thieves and Borderlands 3. Still more are working their way into future products and services, and into the hands of developers.

Use the timelines below to explore several threads of audio and acoustics research as they evolved from theories and experiments to real-world applications.

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Speech recognition and natural user interfaces