While most communications technology has improved over the last quarter century in terms of throughput, latency, cost, etc., voice calls have become horrid.
Every aspect of telephone calls has become a total nightmare. Constant spam calls, poor audio quality, phones doing weird and random things in terms of answering calls and routing the audio to the proper device.
It is strange how telco's have managed to absolutely devalue their core product so thoroughly.
The first beta for the Android 13 quarterly release includes a new “clear calling” feature that “reduces background noises during calls.”
That's neat, but background noise is not the issue as much as laggy over-compressed audio. Reducing noise might help make the over compression not so bad, but it won't fix the horrible lags, IMO.
I still remember distinctly when it all started going to hell. At least for me. Cordless phones. The old AT&T handsets were comfortable, you could rest that against your ear for hours. For some reason the cordless phones quickly abandoned that notion and went for smaller size, sacrificing ergonomics to get it. So now it was uncomfortable against your ear, -and- you had all the degradation in audio quality that came with early wireless tech.
ergonomics too, long gone are the days where you'd get the call started in one second. I know the market forces that drove the "call" app to become so subpar but it's still impressive how many fragile steps you have to get to someone.
Every aspect of telephone calls has become a total nightmare. Constant spam calls, poor audio quality, phones doing weird and random things in terms of answering calls and routing the audio to the proper device.
It is strange how telco's have managed to absolutely devalue their core product so thoroughly.