VoxForge
VoxForge
I picked up one of these for $20 at a local bargain electronics store. I was interested to see how well the noise cancellation worked. I have a fairly quiet location but it is plagued by noisy WiFi signals which cause a lot of popping, scratching and clicking on my regular headsets.
I'm impressed. The pops clicks and scratches are all gone. Sound is clear and uninterrupted. I'll be doing some speech recognition tests with it later.
Part of the documentation does warn that the non-replaceable battery will eventually wear out. This raises the issue of quality of recordings used to build audio models. By the time they become mature perhaps we will be using quite different hardware from that used to make the model? Is our investment ephemeral?
Before I lead anybody astray on this headset, I have been having problems. It works fine when pairing with a Windows laptop and with my Nokia E71 phone, but it does not behave well with my Linux machine.
The very first pairing with linux worked no problem out of the box with my reliable USB Belkin adapter. 3 other headsets work fine (Plantronics, Jabra).
Subsequent attempts to pair follow this pattern - set headset into pairing mode, use bluedevil to detect the headset (OK) set the password (OK) then the headset appears to be recognized and listed but I cannot connect to it. Debug shows authentication failed even though the auto detect and manual 0000 password approaches apparently are successful. Tried 2 other adapters, no success. Updated bluez, no difference. If anyone has one of these and has it working with Linux I would be interested to know.
Headset is finally working. Thanks to advice from the bluez developers, it seems there is an issue with secure authentication. A workaround is to set the adapter into a particular mode with:
# hciconfig hci0 sspmode 0
and re-pairing. This works, headset is now reliably functional.