After STEP Labs demo (below) I caught up with CEO Robert Mitro who provided more details on the technology and his company. Taiwanese company GG Telecom has already built a visor-mounted Bluetooth car kit using STEP's technology, the R1 Car Kit with iVoice technology, and should be available soon in retail for $130. Check for the Step OnBoard label on those products.

Mitro's video interview after the jump.

"STEP Labs is an acoustic technology company [...] and also has a design shop that allows us to help customers to design their first dual microphone headset product.

It's noise elimination. So that's one thing that's different from anything else that's out in the market [...] The heritage comes from people that were in the hearing aid business [...] But it's a different spin on the same fundamental technology [...] Our technology is a general purpose technology. Right now we are focused on the acoustic arena as the first of many possible applications. Beyond that we could do ultrasound for medical applications, radar and sonar...

Traditional technologies take a signal of voice and noise and put processing power to extract voice out of the signal in general. And what happens when you do that, you distort the voice because you're leaving some of the voice behind and taking some of the noise with it. Our technology is fundamentally different [...] It understands what the sound wave propagation is and measuring what the sound wave should look like close to your mouth [...] and any other waves coming from different part of the room will have a different shape [...] So we're preserving this and just ignoring every other noise.

So it's natural, instantaneous and very clear signal to both speech communications for people and for voice recognition engine, for all the command and control applications, in automobiles".