Voice capability option in bluetooth low energy

Question

I'm working on a project where I need to use a microphone as input for a mobile application, this microphone will send data over BLE. So I'm wondering is that possible, because in some specifications of BLE on the internet they said that the BLE doesn't support the voice capability, so please what is exactly the voice capability in Bluetooth Low Energy.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

BLE does not support transmission of voice and there is no standard way. You may need to implement a custom profile or service as per your use case. Vendors like TI offer custom profile that utilizes the GATT layer of the BLE5-Stack to transmit voice frames. This is known as a Voice over GATT Profile approach (VoGP).

However, in the beginning of 2020, Bluetooth SIG announced about LE audio. The Classic Audio operates on the Bluetooth Classic radio while LE Audio operates on BLE. LE Audio will allow the protocol to carry audio and also adds features like Audio Sharing(one set of headphones connecting to multiple audio sources or multiple headphones connecting to one source) and help in development of hearing aids, however it will take time for LE audio to materialize or for devices to support this. Bluetooth SIG plans to release LE Audio specifications over the first half of 2020.

Few references are as below :

TI Custom profile

BLE Technical details

LE Audio (Bluetooth SIG)

LE Audio (Wiki)

LE Audio Spec release timeline