Besides the Bosch products that the typical consumer knows, there are a range of products geared toward the corporate and government markets.

These products include video cameras used for security and surveillance of a buildings exterior, toll roads and public garages. Card readers for controlled access to a building and to restricted areas within the building. Intrusion and fire detection systems as well as speakers used  for public safety.  Lastly, Bosch provides conferencing systems used by many of the Fortune 500 companies in their corporate boardrooms as well as governments and the United Nations!

The first standard for speech transmission was proposed in 1971 and was adopted by the Accoustical Society of America in 1980.

The goal of Speech Intelligibility standards is to ensure public safety in areas where a large number of people congregate or work. For instance shopping malls, university campuses, hospitals, office buildings, airports, train stations, and museums to name a few.

In case of an emergency or to merely get a message to an individual in those locations, it is no longer sufficient to have just a simple paging system.

The system must be fail-safe and the instructions being broadcast must be able to be heard and understood to preset distances.

The Bosch corporation could provide the surveillance cameras, the fire detection and intrusion systems, access control to the building and to secure areas within the building and even the conferencing system used by the corporate executives but had no product that met the speech standards. Suddenly, Bosch's ability to provide a complete end to end solution for such locations was in doubt.

When you are a multi billion dollar corporation that does business on every continent the problem can be solved in 1 of 2 ways.  You can develop the solution in house or you can buy a company that has the technology and expertise to build the solution. 

Bosch decided to buy Electro Voice.  EV had been making speakers, microphones, amplifiers and digital signal processing equipment for over 80 years.

EV's mics have been the standard in radio and TV broadcasting since those industries were born. EV equipment is used on tours with A list musicians. Bosch bought EV and now EV IS the communications division of the Security Systems group.

EV's technology allows Bosch to provide the end to end solution. The Praesideo Emergency Evacuation system is installed in 200 locations worldwide. It features the fail safe design as well as the speech standards that make it choice for such diverse applications as cruise ships, off shore oil platforms, airports, train stations, museums and skyscrapers. EV technology has also enhanced the conferencing solutions found in the product families CCS Ultro and  Digital Congress Network.

Bosch has helped EV by modernizing the factories and introducing business practices that have resulted in the TourX and LiveX line of speakers and the Q-series of amps.