Yelling robot voice sound7/5/2023 Apple and Google’s PR departments didn’t get back to me when I asked them about this problem. Still having trouble? There could be an issue with your phone’s codecs-the computer programs that convert signals from one format to another. You can find instructions online for how to control WiFi calling for both iPhone and Android devices. On the other hand, if you’ve got poor cellphone reception at home, it might help to turn on WiFi calling. That feature can help save money by cutting your data usage, but there’s a downside: If you’re in the middle of a call being sent over the internet, and there’s suddenly a bunch of competing traffic from someone streaming a movie, for example, the call can get messed up. That could mean there’s an issue with your device, rather than something going wrong with the signal along the way.įirst, try turning off your phone’s WiFi calling feature, which routes your calls over WiFi instead of cellular networks. It’s a different story if the robot voice is cropping up all the time. ![]() If that doesn’t cut it, try moving to a different location, or ask the person on the other end of the line to do so. “That’s like rebooting-it can create a different path,” for the data, Udani says. If it’s an issue that’s bothering you on one particular call, the easiest fix is to hang up and dial again. But if it comes up frequently, engineers have a few suggestions. The robot voice problem can happen to anyone, from time to time. “Sometimes it does a great job, but sometimes it can sound robotic or distorted,” Udani says.Įssentially, the distorted voice you’re hearing is the result of a bunch of little computers involved with your phone call, trying their best to chime in and help you get your message across. So instead, the system tries to correct the error, guessing at what those missing bits might be and generating sound to fill the gaps in the middle of your words. Your phone could just play silence for the parts of the call where the information isn’t coming through correctly, but that would be hard to understand. With a call, “you can’t resend the packets because there are just milliseconds of delay,” and there’s no backup copy of your voice. Your cell phone and other telecommunication systems also use error detection, “but with voice calls you don’t have the luxury of retransmission,” says Sanjay Udani, a technologist at Verizon who was one of the lead architects of the company’s FIOS network. But the fix is a lot more complicated with real-time, continuous streams of information like phone calls. The system just asks the sender to transmit another copy of the data. The errors can be relatively simple to deal with when the information is something like a text, an email, or the words and photos on a webpage. He described the effort in a book called “WiFi and the Bad Boys of Radio.” “We used a lot of that technology,” Hills says. WiFi also transmits data using radio frequencies. It’s a scenario he knows well from the time he spent in the early 1990s building the world’s first big WiFi network. “The receiver knows it has this stream of bits, and it has an error detection system that can tell there are little bursts of bits coming through that aren’t right,” Hills says. The solution starts with what’s called error detection. It’s the digital equivalent of the snow or noise you’d hear on an old AM radio. ![]() Other times the signal is strong enough to maintain a connection, but part of the information the radio waves are transmitting gets corrupted-ones get flipped to zeros, or strings of bits are lost altogether. ![]() Problems can crop up when the voice data is being converted from one format to another, but often it’s just interference during wireless transmission, like competing radio traffic or physical objects standing in the way. “That’s how digital works.”īut things can go wrong. Your phone transmits those bits through the air as radio waves. “At the other end, the receiver converts the ones and zeros back to the original information,” Hills says. That’s true no matter the content: texts, emails, your voice on a phone call, you name it. In other words, data is translated into ones and zeros that can be understood by a computer. “When information is going over a digital network, it has to be converted to bits,” says Alex Hills, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Instead, I learned that the robot-voice phenomenon is the result of benevolent technologies trying to prevent interrupted phone calls. When I set out to investigate, I didn’t turn up evidence of an encroaching cyborg army.
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