Dolby isn't necessarily looking to improve the quality of your voice while chatting in-game, but it would like your vocals to interact with the gaming environment in a more realistic fashion. That's the idea behind Dolby's Axon technology, a tool the company introduced today at the Austin Game Developers Conference in Austin, Texas.

The basic idea is that this new tool will make it possible to enable surround panning and distance attenuation, so that your character will sound different if, say, he's behind a wall or closed door as opposed to both you and your teammate standing next to each other in the same room. Think of Creative's EAX technology, only this time it's applied to your voice.

Voice fonts come part of the package too, so if you choose a female avatar, you can sound the part no matter what body organs you may or may not have in real life. And according to Dolby, its Axon software has been designed to consume very little bandwidth, capable of supporting thousands of users per server and able to scale across multiple servers.

No customers have yet been announced, and it's consumer interest that might ultimately decide how many developers jump on board. With the increasingly popularity of Skype and stalwarts such as Teamspeak, is the prospect of customized and realistic in-game chat enough to convince gamers to turn off their third-party voice-chat programs?

Hit the jump and let us know what you think.