Artificial Intelligence continues to be utilized in many professions, including sports. The AI technology can help improve productivity, competition, and technology.

IndyCar has joined forces with leading voice isolation specialist IRIS Audio Technologies to eliminate background noise in real-time from its broadcasts and telecasts.

Because IndyCar is one of the loudest and most extreme sporting environments, background noise often becomes a problem for viewers at home and at the race.

A common complaint from television viewers is the sound of the cars often overpowers the commentators of the race telecast. With advancements in 4K and even 8K televisions and its theater-like audio, the racing sounds are so clear, it has improved that experience.

To provide clarity in terms of communication, IMS Productions, which produces IndyCar broadcasts, has joined forces with IRIS Clarity. Together, the combination is able to provide crystal-clear radio transmissions, placing viewers right at the heart of the race action whether they are watching live on TV, using the IndyCar App powered by NTT DATA or following the action across IndyCar’s social media channels.

“We are focused on getting viewers closer to the action, and there is nothing like listening in to the driver and pit crew audio to understand how a race is unfolding,” said IMS Productions President Kevin Sublette. “With IRIS Clarity, we are able to do just that by removing the background noise and getting clearer audio from the drivers and race teams. We have been working to perfect the implementation since the start of this season and gave our partnership the green light after a successful weekend at the recent Indy 500.”

IRIS Clarity’s AI-powered software is trained on tens of thousands of hours of noise and human voice. It can identify and isolate the voice and remove all noise in real time from all forms of digital communication.

To achieve this with IndyCar, IRIS Audio’s United Kingdom-headquartered team had to overcome multiple technology challenges, including individual race car setups with the wide variety of racetracks on the IndyCar schedule. Those range from high-speed ovals to complex street courses, which impact signal strength and audio quality depending on transmitter positioning.

The solution comes in the form of a custom IRIS Clarity plug-in for Dante, a computer network created by Audinate and used by IMS Productions that transmits audio with utmost fidelity. A significant upside to this implementation is that IRIS Clarity now works on all Dante-supported applications, including arenas and stadiums, recording studios, conference centers, theaters and more.

“We continue to be motivated by bringing our innovative technologies to the forefront of human performance,” said Jacob Anstruther, CEO and Founder of IRIS Audi. “IndyCar is the perfect arena to showcase and challenge our engineers. This is a great opportunity to demonstrate how clarity in mission-critical communications is not only vital for success and performance but also instrumental to experiencing the action in real-time.”

The partnership with IndyCar follows IRIS Audio’s earlier audio partnerships with more integrations of IRIS Clarity to follow across a range of sporting and other use cases where mission-critical communications are essential to performance.

“This was an extremely fun and challenging project to bring IRIS real-time voice isolation to an exciting and high-performance use case,” said Rob Reng, Chief Technology Officer, and co-founder of IRIS Audio. “IRIS technology paired with Dante audio transmission allows us to bring the audience right into the excitement of each race by clearly transmitting driver communications, letting them hear every important moment with Clarity.

“It's a fantastic showcase of how portable our SDK is, and how dozens of concurrent channels can be processed with AI technology on a single computer — something that simply wasn't possible before IRIS.”

IRIS Audio Technologies is an audio technology company with a mission to enable the world to Listen Well. Our suite of patented products leverages decades of research into the effects of sound on the brain, prioritizing focus, productivity, and wellness for all. By harnessing the science of sound, IRIS Audio dramatically improves how people experience audio across all digital platforms, from video meetings to streaming, podcasts to audiobooks, and multiple sectors including call centers, public services, and motor racing.