Our Mission
At VoiceAge, our mission is to maintain our global leadership in low bit rate, high-quality digital speech and audio compression.

Background
Solidly rooted in its founding members Sipro Lab Telecom, the Université de Sherbrooke and the inventors of ACELP®, VoiceAge was incorporated in 1999. Our main goal was clear: to expand the strategic positioning of the ACELP® technology. At its creation, VoiceAge focused on two related business activities: (1) participating in the emerging competition for wideband standard codecs and (2) offering the market optimized standard and proprietary codec solutions.

Since then, our focus has broadened in tandem with the achievement of wideband codec standards, for example, AMR-WB, G722.2, VMR-WB, and AMR-WB+. With other IPR owners such as Nokia and Ericsson, VoiceAge operates two patent pools: for AMR narrowband and AMR-WB+. And soon we’ll be operating other patent pools for the new, emerging wideband standards. As for codec implementations, we offer packaged, optimized wideband codec solution libraries, which are available for many different platforms.

Our ACELP® technology platform is internationally recognized. Adopted at 3GPP and 3GPP2 as the core wideband speech and audio coding technology for wireless applications, it was also adopted at ITU for teleconferencing and voice-over-packet applications and in the CableLabs® PacketCable™ 2.0 specification. Today, VoiceAge occupies a strategic position in the sphere of emerging wideband speech and audio compression technologies.

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Our Business Activities
VoiceAge is engaged in the development, integration, and marketing of digital speech and audio compression solutions and services that operate over wired and wireless networks and in consumer electronics and toys. Our business activities focus on three areas:

Our Customers
At VoiceAge, our team focuses their energy on anticipating and meeting the forward-looking needs of our clients and business partners, who work primarily in the manufacturing of handsets/infrastructure, streaming infrastructure, PDAs, digital cameras, and toys; wireless integration; content provision and creation; teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and VoIP (voice over IP); and call center applications, including call monitoring and recording.

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Our Leading-Edge Technology
Our research team stands among the inventors of the majority of the international communication low bit rate compression standards that have been adopted in the past ten years—quite an accomplishment!

We hold more than 500 granted patents and patent applications in the field of low bit rate speech and audio compression. Our engineers invented the internationally recognized ACELP® technology platform, the patented core audio codec technology present in 15 telecommunication standards, notably: GSM EFR (ETSI), PCS 1900, IS136 (TIA, North American TDMA), IS 95 (TIA, North American CDMA), TETRA (ETSI), G.729 (ITU-T), G.723.1 (ITU-T), AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) narrowband (ETSI and 3GPP), AMR-WB (3GPP), G.722.2 (ITU-T), MPEG4 CELP Audio (ISO), PDC-EFR (ARIB-Japan), VMR-WB (3GPP2), and most recently AMR-WB+ (3GPP).

ACELP® technology is deployed in more than one billion mobile phones—93% of digital cellular phones worldwide. In addition, since 1994 ACELP® has become a de facto standard for voice applications on the Internet (present on over 500 million PCs worldwide) and has been integrated by companies such as Microsoft, RealNetworks, and Apple into their Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime Player products, respectively.

The technological and commercial positioning of the ACELP® technology combined with the strong expertise acquired by the VoiceAge research team over many years provide tremendous advantages to our clients and partners. Because we are at the forefront of innovation, we enable our customers and partners to offer highly competitive added-value products and services to their respective markets.

Our Strategic Investors
The three main strategic investors in VoiceAge are Sipro Lab Telecom, Nokia, and the Université de Sherbrooke, each of them recognized as leaders in their respective markets: standard codec patent licensing, mobile communications manufacturing, and speech and audio coding technology development.

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