The Voice Tracker™ I array microphone was designed with two objectives. The first was to provide coverage throughout a large room for recording or conferencing applications to eliminate the need for multiple microphone/mixer setups, which require expert installation and are expensive. The second was to provide high quality audio for automatic speech recognition without the encumbrance of wearing a head set mic or holding a handheld mic.

Pick up over an entire room is accomplished in two ways. First, sensitivity was increased compared to conventional microphones by constructively adding the output of eight separate always on microphone elements. Second, spatial filtering and background noise reduction are used to eliminate sound from all areas in the room except that space around the active talker, so the increased sensitivity is not corrupted by noise.

As a consequence, the Voice Tracker™ I Array Microphone can pick up talkers at ranges of 30+ feet in meeting/classroom recording or conventional conferencing applications. It can work effectively for command control automatic speech recognition application at the same distances, and full vocabulary ASR at ranges of a few feet.