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Comment by xeno42 | Hacker News Reader

I've been using https://krisp.ai/ to great effect with Zoom while sitting outside on the laptop with road traffic, birds, etc nearby - My team really had a "wow" moment when i turned it on the first time

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Krisp is embedded into Discord (enable beta settings) and the voice chat quality far exceeds any of the "business" focused software I've ever used.

Not to mention the screensharing is infinitely better as well. It's pretty pathetic of the busines sapps, we went through a day where I was trying to screenshare something and my remote coworkers kept complaining of lag, blurriness, or the app would just crash (slack). We went through ms teams, zoom, slack, and google meet. All had issues. Convinced everyone to install Discord and suddenly I was able to shared my desktop perfectly at 1080p without noticeable lag and crystal clear audio.

I will say, using Krisp, it has the same problem that basically all these 'AI' based noise cancelling seem to exhibit: sound quality deteriorates when outside noise is suppressed, and people seem to sometimes not meet the threshold and get completely cut out from talking in some scenarios.

It's still better than food noises, but I have noticed that as a disadvantage.

Discord's lack of lag in audio makes a huge difference for voice comms. I've only used it for gaming, but you can really tell the difference when you switch to the game's voice chat feature which has probably a third of a second of latency. And of course Zoom et. al. have a lot more lag and it really hurts the experience. In addition to low latency, the sound is also very good quality.

Note also that no messages in Discord, including individual messages/DMs, are end-to-end encrypted. This is precisely the same security issue that Zoom has (and Slack, and IRC without OTR).

Discord can and does log all messages through the system, and has many internal tools that operate on the plaintext. Anything you communicate through Discord you should assume any/all Discord staff may read.

They claim that the voice comms are e2e but there are no further details available (like where the keys are generated).

It would be amazing if there was a tool like Krisp that could automatically noise cancel outside noise in your headphones for people who work with audio in loud environments. Not clear if that's at all possible without your headphones having microphones built into them to accurately detect incoming outside signal.

How is this different from noise cancelling headphones currently available? Or do you mean something like this to add the feature to non-noise cancelling headphones?

>Not clear if that's at all possible without your headphones having microphones built into them to accurately detect incoming outside signal.

I'm guessing they mean to add the feature set to standard headphones. Leveraging say the laptop microphone to provide active noise canceling to someone with a standard set of earbuds.

Noise cancelling works by shifting the sound waves of noise, which come into your ears. The ups and downs (of pressure) in the sound wave are added together, cancelling the wave altogether. Each ear get different noise, so the microphones should be as close as possible to each ear and work absolutely independently. Thats why microphone of your laptop is not of any help here, it simply gets completely different noise, which cannot cancel out one getting into your ears. This is more physics than software.

With two different microphones on the laptop, you could triangulate sources of noise and figure out what will reach your ears. With three or more, even better. This sounds like a difficult and interesting signal processing problem, but I wouldn't rule it out.

It would also have to know where each of your ears is in relation to the microphone with millimeter accuracy.

It's not possible. The only reason ANC works is because the microphones are located (physically) to your ears and so are the speakers/headphone drivers. If they're in some random location you can't inject anti-noise and you can't detect the noise accurately.

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