POLQA (Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Analysis, ITU-T P.863) is the successor to PESQ and the current reference for objectively scoring voice quality. Like PESQ it is full-reference — it compares degraded speech against a clean original and predicts a MOS — but it extends coverage to super-wideband and fullband speech and handles modern codecs, higher bandwidths, and processing that PESQ couldn't. It is widely used to benchmark codecs, validate VoLTE and VoIP networks, and tune enhancement algorithms without convening human listening panels for every test. POLQA's predictions are calibrated against large sets of real subjective scores, so it serves as a fast, repeatable proxy for the human MOS it is designed to estimate.
