Tencent and Insta360 jointly released new smart audio products: Overcoming vertical positioning and defining new standards for indoor audio-visual collaboration | The Frontline

Text | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

In late September this year, Insta360 announced the launch of the Wave AI omnidirectional recording microphone, which is equipped with Tencent Tianlai Inside solution. At a recent media communication meeting, both parties first disclosed their in - depth co - creation process over the past three years.

This cooperation aims to combine Insta360's innovation in hardware design with the profound audio algorithm accumulation of Tencent Cloud Tianlai Laboratory to solve the core audio pain points in indoor meetings, remote collaboration, and professional content creation scenarios.

The market direction of the Wave AI omnidirectional recording microphone is very clear. Firstly, it aims to achieve efficient remote collaboration, providing enterprise users with a more immersive remote meeting experience, solving problems such as inaccurate sound positioning and environmental noise interference, and improving communication efficiency. Secondly, it provides reliable sound source identification, flexible sound pickup modes, and convenient recording and transcription for interview content creators who conduct a lot of on - site recordings, reducing the use of scattered sound - collecting devices and simplifying the cumbersome post - production organization work. Thirdly, by combining Tencent Tianlai's audio algorithms with Insta360's hardware design, it jointly promotes the meeting intelligent microphone solution to become a new industry standard.

From the perspective of audio solutions, the core value of the Wave AI omnidirectional recording microphone at the software level lies in its ability to accurately process complex acoustic environments.

Zheng Jincong, the hardware product manager of Insta360, said: "Under the condition of a very small spacing (due to hardware physical limitations), Tianlai needs to break through the limitations of the algorithm, that is, the limitation of accuracy, to provide good sound source positioning and noise reduction effects at this spacing. This also includes the 3A algorithm for echo cancellation behind it."

This means that the solution integrates the 3A (AEC, ANC, AGC) algorithms that Tencent Meeting Tianlai Laboratory has developed over more than 20 years. It can effectively eliminate echoes, suppress environmental noise, and automatically balance the volume, ensuring clear and pure sound quality even on small - array hardware.

Traditional microphone arrays mostly focus on sound source positioning on the horizontal plane (X - Y axis), making it difficult to accurately capture changes in the vertical height of the speaker. However, in actual meeting or live - streaming scenarios, speakers may stand up, walk around, or write on the whiteboard, and height changes are common. The Wave AI omnidirectional recording microphone innovatively adopts the ability of vertical sound source positioning (Z - axis positioning).

Zheng Jincong explained the importance of the three - dimensional microphone array: "Since we have a three - dimensional microphone array, we need to be able to perform sound source positioning in the Z - axis direction because most products on the market only offer planar sound source positioning. But ours can provide vertical sound source positioning." In the combined solution of Wave and the network camera Link, this ability ensures the perfect coordination between sound and vision. That is, "when you stand up, the pan - tilt of the camera can track the human voice upwards. Without this sound source positioning, I wouldn't know how high you stand."

This vertical positioning ability is the foundation for achieving high - precision speaker tracking. It can match the changes in the sound source in real - time and three - dimensionally, thereby driving the pan - tilt or intelligent camera to make smooth and accurate picture adjustments, greatly enhancing the smoothness and sense of presence in remote collaboration and professional video production.

Zheng Jincong also revealed that before the product was finalized, about six generations of prototypes were iterated only in terms of acoustics.

Insta360's entry into the indoor meeting and professional audio fields is a strategic manifestation of its efforts to expand its business scope and extend its core imaging capabilities. Yuan Yue, the Chief Strategy Officer of Insta360, believes that whether it's outdoor or indoor products, the core logic is the same: "The most important thing is whether the product can bring value to customers and make them willing to pay for it."

Tencent, on the other hand, outputs its long - term accumulation in the audio algorithm field through mature solution forms to support hardware innovation and accelerate the implementation of technology. Shang Shidong, the vice - president of Tencent Cloud and the director of Tianlai Laboratory, said that the purpose of the cooperation is to "form a solution based on the algorithm capabilities that Tencent has accumulated over the past 20 years" and combine it with Insta360, which is good at hardware, to jointly create user value.