Glossary
Far-field audio
Speech recorded at a distance from the microphone — across a room rather than into a headset — where reverberation and background noise dominate the captured signal.
Smart speakers, meeting rooms, and robots all hear far-field speech: SNR drops with distance and room echo smears the signal. Systems compensate with microphone arrays, beamforming, and echo cancellation, and they need matching training data — recordings from real rooms at real distances, or close-mic audio augmented with simulated reverberation. Real far-field recordings remain the reference the simulations are checked against.
Why it matters
Data recorded in real rooms at real distances trains the robustness that close-mic studio audio cannot.