The human need to communicate and connect during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the increasing use of teleconferencing applications. Users naturally pay attention to audio quality in choosing a teleconference application from many available and easily accessible teleconferencing applications. Audio quality is affected by the audio coding method used and developed on the application. This work compares the audio quality among teleconferencing applications by evaluating using subjective test, objective test, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) assessment. Subjective test assessment is chosen as the primary method because it assesses perceptual audio quality. The standard of subjective test used is ITU-R BS.1116-3: Methods for the Subjective Assessment of Small Impairments in Audio Systems, which aims to identify small differences between audio quality. The assessment is conducted by comparing the original audio and compressed audio from 5 teleconferencing applications: Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and RingCentral. The original audio sample is recorded from the speaker side while the compressed audio sample is recorded from the receiver side. Both samples are assessed using the subjective test method by 20 subjects. The assessment results of each audio teleconferencing application is different even though some applications use the same codec. We found that the RingCentral apps tends to have a higher average score, and Zoom audio tends to have the lowest average score among the tested audio applications.
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=21677
