While smartphones have officially changed the ways in which we live our lives, they’ve also altered our expectations when it comes to the quality of services that they offer us. The majority of us would consider trading in our phone if it was slow to open a page or an app by even a millisecond of our expectations.
In the same way, we’ve gotten accustomed to a certain voice quality on our calls, and have trouble finding the patience to deal with anything less than amazing. So, how can you guarantee you get the best voice quality during your calls? Follow these tips to learn how.
Examine the Space You’re In
If your room is situated in a basement, for instance, or if there’s construction going outside your house, chances are the person you are talking to won’t be able to hear you as well as they should. If your friends are complaining of an echoey audio or a muffled sound, take a look around and try to figure out what it is about your environment that might be causing these audio problems.
Once you’ve detected where the noise is coming from, try one of these sound blocking tips: Fix the problem by hanging blankets or any other dense material from your walls to cut down an echo, or add a carpet to create a less noisy space. You can also put a pair of headphones on to prevent the person on the line from hearing themselves.
Take a Look at Your Device
Now that you’ve checked out the environment you’re in, take a look at your actual device. Moden smartphones now include high-quality microphones and speakers as well as an earpiece that is usually covered in materials to improve its durability and water resistance. Your device needs to be able to not only capture and playback sound, but to send and receive that information. This requires high-quality radios and antennas that can connect to your carrier’s network all while filtering out the noise around you. If your phone isn’t quite cutting it, you might consider getting a new one.
Update Your Audio Settings
This may sound confusing if you’re not super technical, but it’s one of the first things you should do if you wish to improve your sound quality. You want to make sure you familiarize yourself with the audio settings of the applications you use, then set up your audio and microphone outputs and test them. You can even upgrade your audio levels on Windows by tweaking the sample rate on a connected microphone and disabling unnecessary audio devices. Try recording yourself via your desktop to play it back and hear what you and your space sound like.
Your Calls Are Only As Good As Your Network
You may have a top notch phone, but if your carrier is focused on improving infrastructure and bandwidth for the next generation of video and cloud services chances are your audio sound isn’t top priority. The frequency in which your network connects to your device could improve your carrier’s performance.
Therefore, if you’re using Voice-over-IP (VoIP) services on your phone – like Viber – to conduct business calls, try minimizing the amount of data streamed across your network. You can do this by pausing massive file transfers, getting off Netflix and Popcorn, and only updating your apps when you know you won’t be needing to conduct any calls. If all else fails, you might consider upgrading your bandwidth capacity with your service provider.
Extra Tip for Viber for Desktop Users: Upgrade Your Headphones
For many people who have voice quality issues on their VoIP calls the natural move is to upgrade to a better set of headphones. If you’re most concerned about call quality, choose a noise-cancelling set of headphones and take into consideration that corded and USB headsets usually deliver more stable sound quality than their wireless or Bluetooth counterparts. Remember that an expensive microphone doesn’t guarantee great audio quality. But, it could help control the environmental noise you can’t quiet down.
There is no doubt there are even more suggestions on how you could better the quality of your sound during your call, but it was important to us to mention the top culprits you should look into. Go through the list of tips we just gave you and find out what’s been standing in the way of your having amazing voice quality on your call.