Remote work: how to kill background noise on calls

2020-12-08

Krisp app review

Selling Element means constant remote presentations and phone calls.

Since my daughter was born – she’s a year and a half now – I’ve been taking calls from home a lot more. Zosia doesn’t care that her dad is in the middle of a demo. She plays as loudly as she wants. And little Dakar, our new puppy, sticks his nose into everything.

So how do you handle calls when the background sounds like a daycare crossed with a dog park?

You use the free app Krisp.

Krisp detects background noise and strips it out, so the person on the other end hears only your voice. I tested it. It works.

The app is trained on thousands of hours of recorded sounds – babies crying, dogs barking, traffic, airport announcements, that kind of thing. The Krisp.ai website has more details on how the AI side works.

Setup is simple. After you install it, a new virtual device appears called “Krisp Microphone.” You select that in Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, or whatever you use for calls. Everything that hits the mic goes through Krisp‘s filter first. Only your voice gets through to the other side.

One thing I appreciate: all the processing happens locally on your device. Nothing gets sent to the cloud. That matters if you’re on confidential calls, which in my line of work is most of them.

I’ve been using Krisp for several weeks now – during our ATS demos and in dev meetings with the Element team. A few times I had the TV on behind me and Zosia running around the room in full toddler mode. I warned people upfront that I was in a noisy spot and testing a noise-cancelling app. After the calls, every single person said they hadn’t heard anything but my voice. I was honestly surprised how well it worked.

There’s also a reverse mode. If the other person is the one in a noisy place, you can turn on “Krisp Speaker” and it filters their background noise too. Handy when someone calls you from a cafe or an open-plan office.

The free tier gives you 120 minutes of filtered calls per week. If you only deal with noisy environments occasionally, like I do, that’s enough. The paid plan is 5 USD a month and removes the time limit: