The success of each call in contact centers depends on many factors, but everything starts with audio clarity.
When calls run long or customers sound muffled, contact centers usually upgrade the hardware with better mics and pricier headsets. But does hardware provide sound clarity and voice boost for customers' voices, or does it only make agents' voices better? Let’s talk about the best call center headsets on the market, how they handle voice boosting and noise cancellation features and bring in our Voice Boost technology that can give the same and even better results on all headsets.
What is the current challenge in contact centers?
Agents feeling frustrated with customers' muffled voices? The solution businesses offer is simply turning the volume up on headsets. But what if the solution isn't higher volume or better hardware at all? What if your agents don't need only louder voices because a louder voice also means louder noise?
Here is where Hecttor's Voice Boost technology can help. Comparing hardware with software is challenging, but voice boost is a feature worth having in a contact center.
A study shows 95% of agents lose concentration and efficiency solely due to persistent poor audio quality.
P.S. Voice Boost is not about making everything louder. It's about making speech more understandable, intelligible, and contextual, and only when it matters.
Why Louder Isn't Always Clearer
In most contact centers, headset upgrades are considered the default solution to audio problems. Better equipment equals a better experience, right? Not necessarily.
Most hardware boosts all sounds equally: the voice, the silence, the background noise, and even line noise. Agents might hear everything louder but still miss what was actually said. Worse, they can't distinguish between critical speech and irrelevant noise.
The problem isn't volume. It's the quality.
What Is Hecttor's Voice Boost?
Unlike plain voice control features that we have in our devices (not only agent headsets), Hecttor's Voice Boost technology is a real-time, adaptive enhancement layer built into Hecttor's core system. It doesn't just raise volume. It detects when speech becomes hard to follow due to audio weakness, fast delivery, poor enunciation, or inconsistent mic quality and subtly boosts only those moments.
The rest of the conversation? It stays untouched.
There's no manual control: agents enable it once, and voice boost will silently fix the call's poor quality.
How Voice Boost Technology Works
Voice Boost uses a combination of acoustic and linguistic signals to decide when and how to enhance speech.
Energy detection: Identifies dips in audio that fall below clarity thresholds.
Syllable density & speech structure: Recognizes rapid clusters of syllables where speech tends to become cognitively taxing and boosts only those critical patches.
Spectral filtering: Ensures ambient sound and non-speech audio aren't amplified.
Noise suppression (denoising): Not just boosting clarity, but actively cleaning up messy audio environments.
Unlike volume normalization, which maintains a constant loudness level, Voice Boost works more surgically. It enhances only speech, and it does so with real-time agility on resource-constrained desktops.
In other words, it hears the problem before the agent has to say, "Can you repeat that?"
Why Agents Love Voice Boost
What makes Voice Boost effective is how invisible it is. Just like Hecttor's speech speed adjustment technology, which works in the background without the agent's constant manipulation, once enabled, voice boost will work and literally make the agent's life easier. They don't even think about it. They just stop saying, "Sorry, could you repeat that?" quite so often.
And when paired with Hecttor's real-time speech-adjusting feature, voice boost becomes a cognitive relief engine, making every word easier to catch.
Our agents report:
- Fewer misunderstandings
- Less fatigue after long call shifts
- Faster response time when speech is difficult
All without changing their workflow.
Comparing Hecttor's Voice Boost with Headsets
We have explored the features of the top 10 best headsets for contact centers, and they are absolute winners. One thing should be clear. We never say Hecttor replaces contact center hardware, but we do have a technology that enhances any hardware features and increases desk worker productivity.
Our research included the following professional hardware for call centers.
- EPOS IMPACT 860T ANC Stereo PC Headset
- EPOS/Sennheiser DW 10 Premium Wireless Office Headset
- Yealink WH64 Dual Teams Wireless Headset
- Vega Office Premium Binaural Corded QD Headset
- Logitech Zone 305 Wireless Headset
- Jabra Evolve2 50
- Poly Voyager 4310-M UC Headset
- Nuroum HP31D
- EPOS SDW 5011 Convertible Wireless DECT PC Headset
- Jabra Evolve 65 TE MS Stereo Wireless PC & Bluetooth Headset
What do you do when your devices break or wear out? You buy new ones. What do you do when your software gets outdated? You get software updates at no cost.
With slight differences in features and prices, those premium headsets share the same functionality.
Noise-canceling microphones to reduce ambient distractions of the agent’s voice
Padded comfort design for long shifts
Multi-device connectivity (USB, Bluetooth, DECT)
High-fidelity speaker tuning for audio sharpness
But even the best hardware still processes audio uniformly; everything gets louder, whether it's helpful or not.
The Cost of Today's Top Call Center Headsets
Headsets remain an essential part of contact center infrastructure, especially for remote or hybrid teams. Companies that truly prioritize customer service as one of the top revenue drivers heavily invest in contact centers, enhancing both hardware and software. As for hardware, the prices may vary from $99 to $350 per unit. Regardless of the cost and features, headsets have a 2-3 year lifespan with daily use. Some parts of headsets need maintenance and frequent updates, like the padding and wires, if they are not wireless. Microphones also often lose quality due to internal dust or boom rotation fatigue. Finally, headsets have Bluetooth battery degradation (in wireless models) that begins after ~18 months.
Despite their utility, even premium headsets require frequent replacement in high-volume environments, a hidden operational cost rarely tracked in agent performance ROI.
What's Next for Hector's Voice Boost Technology?
While Voice Boost already delivers real-time clarity and comprehension, the next goal is deeper intelligence.
Constant iterations of the Hecttor voice boost feature will be focused on bandwidth extension. Standard phone calls transmit at ~8 kHz, cutting off much of the natural frequency range in human speech. Hecttor's research is exploring ways to extend missing frequencies, essentially restoring lost acoustic nuance synthetically. Once achieved, any kind of low-quality call will get the quality we all deserve.
The technical challenge? Doing all of this on-device, without high-end hardware, and predicting speech patterns without seeing the whole sentence.
But that's the work and the magic behind what's next.
The Bottom Line: Voice Boost Tech vs. Hardware Solutions
Clarity isn't just about hearing. It's about understanding without strain.
Hecttor's Voice Boost is built for today's contact centers: fast-paced, multilingual, and high-pressure. It gives agents the clarity they need in real time on the systems they already use.
We recognize that in the enterprise world, where customer conversations define loyalty and experience, understanding is the true differentiator. And the smartest clarity investment may not be the hardware but software that may run quietly in the background, doing just enough to let them do their job.
Want to hear the difference for yourself? Book a demo with the Hecttor team: https://hecttor.ai