Google Meet adds a feature that cancels out background noise: traffic, computer fans voices of family members
announced in April, noise cancellation has finally arrived on Google Meet, Google’s video conferencing platform dedicated to business users. It’s not available to everyone yet, but it’s already in the rollout phase and some G Suite users in America are already using it. All the others will be able to use it, most probably, by the end of the month.
Google, with this feature, puts itself on a par with the competition that, due to the boom of smartworking, has gained a lot of ground in recent months so much so that Zoom could claim to have gone from 10 million users to 200 million in just three months. Big growth also for Microsoft Teams, even if with smaller numbers. And Microsoft itself had announced the arrival of noise reduction at the end of March. Google Meet’s noise cancellation system, like those offered by its competitors, is based on complex artificial intelligence algorithms.
Google Meet: how noise cancellation works
The purpose of the noise cancellation algorithm applied to video conferences is to reduce or completely eliminate background noise picked up by the microphone along with the participants’ voices. Constant noises, such as those of urban traffic if a participant is in the middle of the street or at home with the window open, or occasional noises such as a pen banging on the table, the click of the pen itself, a teaspoon spinning in a cup if a participant is drinking a drink, a packet of snacks if he is eating. The sound picked up by the microphone of each participant is sent, encrypted, to the Google Meet servers and then transferred to the other participants after being cleaned by subtracting all these noises. The subtraction is done by comparison with a dataset of sound waves corresponding to the most frequent annoying noises.
Google Meet: how to turn on noise cancellation
Noise cancellation currently works only on the Web version of Google Meet and not on the Android and iOS apps, probably because the latter are managed by other servers. It is active by default, but can be disabled by the user by acting on the microphone settings. From the first tests it doesn’t seem that noise cancellation causes a perceptible delay in audio transmission, but it’s clear that the transmitted sound will be different from the original one: cleaner, but darker.