Nvidia’s AI-powered Broadcast app for improved home audio
Many of us have become all too acutely aware of the lacking quality of microphones as the COVID-19 pandemic has made remote working the norm.
Not only that, but background noise can be a problem, whether from pets, children or anything else.
One possible solution to that comes from Nvidia and harnesses the power of AI. Nvidia says its new Broadcast app can upgrade bog-standard rooms and microphones by using AI to remove noise. In a blog post, Gerardo Delgado, Senior Product Manager, said: “The new NVIDIA Broadcast app [...] upgrades any room into a home broadcast studio by transforming standard webcams and microphones into smart devices through the power of AI.”
The Broadcast plugin is only available on Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX, TITAN RTX or Quadro RTX GPUs, making use of their built-in Tensor Core AI processors.
The move comes after Nvidia’s acquisition of British semiconductor giant Arm, which specialises in the more general purpose chips found in smartphones, heralding Nvidia’s potential arrival on the CPU as well as GPU stage.
Nvidia has long since pursued a strategy to move away from its heartland of manufacturing graphical processing units for gaming to also leveraging their highly parallel computing capabilities for machine learning and other AI endeavours.
In a letter to Nvidia employees announcing the Arm purchase, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke of the potential of AI, saying: “We are joining arms with Arm to create the leading computing company for the age of AI. AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. Learning from data, AI supercomputers can write software no human can. Amazingly, AI software can perceive its environment, infer the best plan, and act intelligently. This new form of software will expand computing to every corner of the globe. Someday, trillions of computers running AI will create a new internet — the internet-of-things — thousands of times bigger than today’s internet-of-people.”
