At the annual TechFest event, Microsoft researchers showed off technology that can make it easier to notice when different like-sounding speakers are talking.

Current audio conferencing systems mix all audio into a single channel, said Zhengyou Zhang, principal researcher at Microsoft Research. The system he helped devise uses different audio channels so that each person’s voice sounds like it is coming from a different direction. Listening to a sample prerecorded audio conference in headphones, it was easy to tell that two different men with similar voices were indeed two people, because one man’s voice sounded like it was coming from the left and the other from the right.

The audio conference technology was one of many projects put on display by Microsoft’s researchers at TechFest. Technologies developed within Microsoft Research sometimes make it into commercial products, but not always.

Other technologies at TechFest came from Microsoft’s Cambridge facility, where researchers are working on systems designed to help people better organize and access photographs and other personal information.

David Kirk showed off what looks like a variation of the Surface tabletop computer. It’s smaller and built into a wood table. While it uses infrared light to detect movement on the screen, like the Surface, its lights shine from the sides rather than beaming through the screen.