For anyone who relies on wireless earbuds on a daily basis, struggling to be heard on a phone call can be an all-too-familiar frustration. Whether you’re navigating a busy street or just dealing with ambient chatter, background noise can make clear communication nearly impossible.
When developing the new Galaxy Buds4 Pro, Samsung focused heavily on completely reimagining how an earbud captures and transmits the human voice. Their first objective was to develop a brand-new Sensor Fusion technology — ensuring a user’s speech can cut through the noise with absolute clarity.
What Is Sensor Fusion and How Is It Important for Call Quality?
When it comes to taking calls, an earbud’s microphone is much farther from your mouth than a phone’s, making your voice highly susceptible to being drowned out by ambient noise. For traditional earbuds relying on a single sensor, this physical limitation often means compromised call quality, especially when ambient noise is louder than the user’s voice.
To overcome this, Samsung applied an environment-aware Sensor Fusion technology1 for Galaxy Buds4 Pro. Instead of relying on one input, Samsung’s technology intelligently combines multiple sensors to recognize and adapt to the surrounding environment.
Galaxy Buds4 Pro is equipped with three microphones — two external microphones directly capture a user’s voice, while a third internal microphone detects speech transmitted within the body. Importantly, a Voice Pickup Unit (VPU) sensor based on bone conduction also detects the head’s physical vibrations when a user speaks.
The voice data then activates a noise reduction algorithm that allows Galaxy Buds4 Pro to precisely isolate and comprehensively reconstruct the user’s voice from surrounding noise with pinpoint accuracy, ensuring clear communication even in the most chaotic environments.
How Sophisticated Is Galaxy Buds4 Pro’s Noise Reduction Algorithm?
An AI-based system called a Deep Neural Network (DNN) — modeled loosely on the structure of the human brain — serves as the core noise reduction technology within Galaxy Buds4 Pro’s Sensor Fusion technology. Typically, software this powerful requires massive computing power that simply cannot fit inside a tiny earbud. However, Samsung meticulously optimized its algorithm for on-device processing, slashing the processing load to roughly 10% of the original computational requirements and shrinking the model size to just 30%, successfully bringing powerful AI voice processing to a compact earbud form factor.
But blocking noise isn’t enough to guarantee true call clarity — the earbuds must also make sure your voice sounds natural. To do that, Galaxy Buds4 Pro analyzes past, present and predictive sound data to instantly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Samsung also upgraded its algorithm to capture 16 times more vocal detail than previous models. Because of this massive boost in precision, every part of your speech — from high-pitched tones to sharp consonants and subtle word endings — remains crisp and easy to understand, no matter how loud your environment gets.
Galaxy Buds4 Pro even accounts for natural body movements that can cause the earbuds to shift, causing ‘fit leakages’ that allow unwanted background noise to seep in. To counter this, Galaxy Buds4 Pro continuously analyzes signals from the inner and outer microphones to estimate leakage in real time, dynamically adjusting the audio to keep the call crystal clear.
Furthermore, Galaxy Buds4 Pro’s superior DNN-powered voice clarity is truly maximized when paired with a Galaxy smartphone, harnessing a Super Wideband (SWB) connection of up to 16 kHz to deliver exceptionally rich and natural voice quality.
How Was Galaxy Buds4 Pro’s Call Quality Tested for the Real World?
To ensure Galaxy Buds4 Pro delivers exceptional call quality in the real world, Samsung brought the real world into the lab using massive wind simulators to recreate acoustic scenarios based on actual location recordings.
In addition to lab testing, Samsung conducted extensive field tests in the noisiest everyday environments including bustling cafes, loud department stores and echoing train stations. They even tested call quality while walking outdoors late at night and riding in cars with the windows rolled down — all to perfect the earbuds’ performance in truly authentic, real-world scenarios.
Ultimately, Galaxy Buds4 Pro proves relentless engineering and technological innovation can shatter the physical limitations of true wireless earbuds. By merging an intricate Sensor Fusion technology with highly optimized algorithms — and validating it through exhaustive real-world testing — Galaxy Buds4 Pro offers an unprecedented level of call clarity, helping you find your voice, anywhere.