Are Conference Calls Taxing on your Brain? AI to The Rescue!

The Cognitive Overload Problem

In the current era of social distancing and COVID-19, more people than ever are working and studying remotely. There is an explosion in the number of people spending dozens of hours a week in one form of conference call or another (Zoom, Skype, Teams, WebEx, Slack, meet, Hangouts, ets). As a result, the barrage of noise and audio artifacts problem is becoming magnified in the new normal Work-From-Home and Study-From-Home culture. Whether we like it or not, every conversation becomes a conference call. Our brains have to deal with every participant's background noise including our own, from crying babies, screaming kids, howling dogs, roaring lawn mowers, coffee grinders, reverberant home offices, highway road-noise, ocean waves, line statics, sometimes even electric toothbrushes, beard trimmers, and toilet flush. This is in addition to the classic narrowband signal and packet loss typical to callers joining from their cell phones. And sometimes all of these happen in the same call. This difficulty among others given rise to the new “Conference Call Anxiety” concept.

To understand the problem, think of the last time you were on a noisy airplane, struggling to focus on your work on the laptop? Stuck at home with kids or a crying baby while trying to focus on a conference call? Or been in a bustling mall, or a crowded echoey restaurant, while having a conversation. If you have been in such a situation, and felt unable to do these simple tasks or felt overwhelmed, you are not alone. You have been experiencing a phenomenon known as “Cognitive Overload”.

What is Cognitive Overload?

Cognitive Overload” is a term commonly used in educational psychology for the situation where a learner is given too much information or too many tasks simultaneously. This results in the learner being unable to process this information”. In layman's terms, the human brain has a limited capacity to perform cognitive tasks. The more tasks you give to the brain, the more exhausted it gets, and fewer resources it can allocate to each task. For example, in a noisy environment, our brains have an impressive ability to isolate the desired speaker from the background such as in a cocktail party. However, keeping our brain focussed on performing this task for an extended period of time leads to poor performance, exhaustion, and fatigue; consequently severely limiting our ability to engage in a lengthy conversation in a noisy environment. 

Why do I have a headache at the end of every conference call?

The unfortunate reality of our modern society is that noise is highly pervasive in our daily lives. We are all exposed to a steady flow of noise. For instance, there are numerous reports of people getting headaches after extended amounts of time on phone calls. This headache is coming from the same source as the one you get in the crowded restaurant or airplane. It is the result of your brain working in overdrive to make sense of a conversation in the midst of all the line noise and artifacts injected by communication standards in the form of audio “codecs”. For the sake of minimizing the cost of voice communication, engineers have introduced what is commonly known as voice codecs. These codecs compress the audio signal to minimize the number of bits needed to represent the signal while keeping the audio signal sounding as natural as possible. The trouble is that the human cognitive system is capable of filtering out distortions in an audio signal. Hence, by design these communication systems tax our cognitive abilities. For this reason, it is no surprise our brains experience fatigue after spending an extended period of time on the phone. This issue is partially responsible for high employee turnover in call centers, a phenomenon known as “Call-Center Burnout”. 

Another factor at play is the unfortunate reality that our nervous system is not designed to endure high levels of stress for prolonged periods of time. In such circumstances, the damage can be long-lasting and irreversible especially in children. Hence, we should think of the noise and distortion plaguing our modern life, the same way we think about environmental pollution. We all can attest to the fact that we feel a significant improvement in our mental capacity after an extended vacation in the countryside away from city noise. These anecdotal observations have been supported by mounting evidence and studies published in the past decade. These studies demonstrate a direct correlation between exposure to noise and decay in one’s cognitive performance and comprehension ability. 

AI to the rescue!

Luckily help is on the way. In the last few years, modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms have significantly improved to address separating speech from background noise effectively. At BabbleLabs, we are building products to enhance real-time conversations by extracting the clean speech signal from a cacophony of noise and artifacts. Our Clear Edge product portfolio, for edge computing devices like laptops, mobile phones, takes advantage of the compute and memory available in the device, to enhance speech quality in real-time. This not only enables more intelligible conversations but also unburdens our mental processing and preserves users' privacy with local processing on the device. We believe with wider adoption of speech AI technology in telecommunications and unified communications and collaboration solutions, we will soon see remote work becoming easier on people’s mental health and improve workforce productivity.  

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