This presentation gives an overview of current approaches to speech privacy in both open-plan and enclosed offices and meeting rooms.

For open-plan offices, new listening tests have confirmed recommended criteria for an acceptable level of speech privacy and an optimum ambient noise level. New (free) software can calculate the speech privacy of new designs and allows the user to listen to simulations of the expected results. Highly absorbing ceilings, adequate workstation panel heights, and adequately large workstation plan sizes are essential for achieving acceptable speech privacy.  

Enclosed offices and meeting rooms often must provide high speech privacy to prevent eavesdroppers outside the room from hearing or understanding speech from the room. A new procedure has been developed to assess speech transmission from offices and meeting rooms to adjacent spaces. New signal-to-noise type measures are then used to determine the degree of speech privacy at listening positions outside the room. The probability of various speech levels in meeting rooms and ambient noise levels outside the meeting rooms has been experimentally determined. For constructions with known or measured sound transmission characteristics, one can now estimate the probability of an eavesdropper being able to understand speech from the meeting room.