We’ve all had to deal with unwanted background noise in our recordings. Whether it’s the sound of your neighbors talking, cars driving by, birds chirping, doors slamming, or any other sound that could distract from your dialogue, a simple audio cleanup tool can help you eliminate those annoying sounds and restore the quality of your audio track. Acoustic treatment can significantly reduce background noise in your recording studio, but it is only sometimes an affordable option. Using a noise removal app is a more straightforward and cost-effective solution. During video calls and chats, it is critical to ensure that a person’s voice can be heard clearly. That is where AI noise suppression comes in.
AI noise suppression software combines deep-learning models to recognize human speech and analyze audio, filtering out background noises. It provides a crisp, clear audio output with noise reduction capabilities, echo and reverberation removal, and low latency.
What Is AI Noise Suppression?
AI noise suppression is a technology that eliminates unwanted or distracting sounds from video calls and chats. This software helps remote workers avoid clamors, concentrate better during work, and enables students to learn more effectively by filtering out ambient noise. It also allows customers to have tension-free conversations with customer service agents, leading to smooth and seamless business meetings. It provides a solution to the question, “How do I remove background noise from audio?”
The technology uses deep learning algorithms to identify speech and weed out external sounds. It’s similar to how human filters out the sounds of a party or a conference room to hear only the person talking nearby. This software is used in various applications, including improving enterprise collaboration, lifecasting, metaverse interactions, and even gaming to remove keyboard noise and other internal sounds from the gamer’s headset.
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How Does It Work?
Noise suppression is widely used across many industries. For instance, it’s an essential component of virtual interviews for job seekers and recruiters. Indeed, a global interviewing platform has built a solution that uses artificial intelligence to remove noise from calls and improve the interview experience. The solution allows jobseekers to speak naturally, without interruptions, and focuses on the essential skills for the role. It also enhances the interviewer’s ability to understand the responses of the job seeker. The result is a more effective and enjoyable experience for both parties.
In a phone call or video conference, AI noise suppression filters out unwanted sounds and creates a clear audio experience for the participants. It enables users to focus on their work, learn or play games by removing distracting sounds like keyboard clicks, fans, construction sounds, echoing, and reverberation.
While humans can easily distinguish what is and isn’t noise, machines must undergo extensive training to recognize the difference. It can be difficult because the human voice shares a lot of frequencies with other natural sounds, so the distinction must be exact to avoid distortions.
Unlike traditional noise reduction algorithms, AI noise suppression uses machine learning to automatically identify the noise source and apply the proper filters to remove it from the audio stream. This process is based on several parameters, including the PESQ, MOS, and STOI metrics, which measure speech quality regarding clarity and intelligibility. It is important to remember that these metrics are subjective, as the listener’s personal experience will differ from one individual to another.
The technology can also adjust its performance depending on the noise frequency. It can make it more effective on lower-quality, narrowband audio signals than traditional algorithms. It is crucial because most communication occurs over these signals, typically available on mobile devices and other disadvantaged environments.
What Are The Advantages?
Whether at work, playing games, or on a video call, noise hindrances can make it hard to understand or concentrate. AI noise suppression removes these distractions and enhances your audio to improve clarity.
This software benefits remote workers by reducing the clamor of background noises like traffic, announcements at railway stations, or even pets. It’s also valuable for businesses that rely on voice or video communication, as it can help them keep their customers happy by ensuring they hear every word they say.
The software can also cancel out sounds unrelated to the conversation, like a loudspeaker, an alarm clock, or a cough from another participant.
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What Are The Disadvantages?
A key disadvantage to this type of technology is that it can be difficult for a machine to differentiate between something intended during a conversation and something unintended. For example, if you’re talking to a friend over video chat and they hum a song in their earbuds. Hence, it’s not likely that the AI will interpret this as noise to be suppressed.
The ability to distinguish different types of voices is also challenging. So, even a human might only be able to do this sometimes.
Another drawback is that it needs to be clarified how accurate the AI will be in suppressing noise. For example, if you have a loud background conversation that includes some laughter, the AI might also mistakenly remove this. As such, it’s essential to have quality metrics for voice enhancement beyond just measuring audio levels and pitch.
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Photo by Ketut Subiyanto
