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Comment by bustling-noose | Hacker News Reader

I was sitting at a Starbucks next to a VERY noisy street on a google meet call on an M1 Air with usb-c AirPods (the cheap 19$ one) and I asked the person on the other end if they can hear me at all. To my surprise they couldn’t hear any noise just my voice. No idea which part in the whole setup achieved this but I feel like stuff like AI and all have some applications that can blow you away. Not putting the damn thing in everything!

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That could definitely be Google Meet. I think it does some pretty fancy AI background noise reduction.

For sure. The Apple hardware is going to make your voice sound better/richer/clearer to begin with, and then Meet's AI is great at removing background noises entirely.

In comparison, if you're on Meet with a crappy mic, it will still remove background noise, but your voice will still sound crappy. I.e. like a crappy mic in a quiet room.

Due to some unfortunate circumstances I had a customer call on Google Meet once while walking across Paris. I ware barely understandable while holding the earphones' mic in front of my mouth...

Good hardware definitely beats software trying to make something out of nothing: can't make directionality out of 1 mic, so Google Meet couldn't filter out background noise in that situation. Though it didn't help that these USB-C DACs seem to all be terrible (I tried several with the best findable reviews) compared to any old headphone jack where the device's internal DAC just worked

In that situation you’re better off using Meet audio only & holding the phone as if doing a video call - the background noise cancellation modern phones do is very impressive but it only really works if you use the phone as a phone & hold it up to your ear / mouth.

Yeah, maybe I should have forfeited being on video for the sake of audio, didn't think it would be this bad. I do attribute at least half the problem to the removal of headphone jacks though, I don't remember this being that big a deal with the regular DAC in any old phone

Yeah, earbud noise cancellation may as well be non-existent unfortunately.

You’d think a phone could do cancellation between the bud microphone & it’s own microphones; maybe once the audio data from the bud has been pushed through bluetooth audio compression there’s no longer enough information to do that effectively?

Correction here: it wasn’t apples AirPods, it was bose quit comfort over the ear iirc. That’s why I could hear the other person. But I think they could hear me cause of maybe both meet and good mic array.

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