en.Wedoany.com Reported - Yamaha (YAMAHA) of Japan offers a product called the "Speech Privacy System," which is not designed to improve sound quality but rather uses "sound masking" technology to make conversations difficult for third parties to overhear, thereby protecting privacy and confidential information. The system has been applied in hospitals, pharmacies, corporate meeting rooms, and shared offices.

Yamaha is renowned for its music business, including pianos and electronic instruments, while its motorcycle operations are handled by Yamaha Motor. The newly launched Speech Privacy System targets everyday scenarios where conversations are "not meant to be heard." For example, after the normalization of working from home, discussions with colleagues in the office may be overheard by those nearby; at a hospital reception desk, when describing symptoms to staff, the conversation might also be noticed by waiting patients. In such situations, people want to ensure their conversations remain confidential.

The system employs "sound masking" technology rather than "noise cancellation." Noise cancellation works by emitting sound waves opposite to the noise waveform to cancel it out, commonly used in limited spaces like headphones, but it is technically challenging to eliminate constantly changing sounds like human speech in a vast three-dimensional space. Sound masking, on the other hand, does not directly eliminate sound but instead covers leaked conversations with special sounds, making "the meaning of the speech unintelligible." In this way, even at relatively low volumes, the content of conversations becomes blurred.