Photo Credit: Nokia
Nokia achieved a significant milestone on June 10, 2024, by making the world’s first live immersive voice and audio call using the new 3GPP Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec.
The groundbreaking call was made by Nokia’s President and CEO, Pekka Lundmark, to Stefan Lindström, Finland’s Ambassador of Digitalization and New Technologies, from Nokia’s campus in Espoo, Finland.
The IVAS codec represents a major leap forward in live voice calling, allowing users to experience 3D spatial sound in real-time, unlike the traditional monophonic smartphone voice calls. This innovation is a part of the upcoming 5G Advanced standard and has been developed by a consortium of 13 companies, with Nokia playing a leading role in its standardization.
Pekka Lundmark highlighted the transformative potential of this technology, stating, “We have demonstrated the future of voice calls. This groundbreaking audio technology takes you to the caller’s environment, creating a spatial and massively improved listening experience for voice and video calls, offering significant benefits for enterprise and industrial applications.”
During the call, Lundmark showcased the distinct acoustic dimensions of the IVAS technology to Lindström, who remarked on its impact, saying, “The live immersive voice and audio experience enabled by IVAS improves the richness and quality of the call, and the three-dimensional sound experience makes interaction more lifelike and engaging, bringing a wealth of new benefits to personal and professional communication. Immersive communications technology will also take XR and metaverse interaction to the next level.”
Jenni Lukander, President of Nokia Technologies, expressed pride in Nokia’s leadership in this field, stating, “I am proud of the leading role Nokia’s researchers and engineers have played in creating these innovative immersive voice and audio technologies. Thanks to standardization, the whole world will now benefit from this innovation.”
The IVAS codec technology enables live spatial audio across various connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, and PCs, significantly enhancing the realism of voice interactions. This advancement is considered the biggest leap in voice calling since the introduction of monophonic telephony.
Despite the technology not yet being implemented in mobile networks, Nokia successfully demonstrated it in a real-time call using its proprietary Immersive Voice technology over a public 5G network. This achievement underscores Nokia’s strong patent portfolio and its leadership in standards development, with over 20,000 patent families, including more than 6,000 essential to 5G.