How to Activate Google Meet’s Background Noise Cancellation
The competition among video conferencing platforms keeps getting stiff; hence companies keep introducing new features to stand out more than others. Google’s video conferencing app, Google Meet formerly known as Hangouts Meet, has introduced a new noise cancellation feature that uses machine learning to differentiate between human voice and background noise.
The company has been working on the feature for quite some time now. It recently announced that it would be rolling out the feature for all its users in the coming months. It is the first app to have an AI-powered cancellation feature. Other video conferencing apps have background noise suppression features but with very many limitations.
How the Noise Cancellation feature works
Noise cancellation is almost similar to speech recognition in that it requires a machine learning model to be trained on understanding speech. By using a labeled data set, the machine learning model is trained to distinguish between noise and speech. As a result, it eliminates the noise and retains the speech. For Google, it had to rely on its own meetings and YouTube audio clips that had a lot of people talking.
Google Meet’s Background Noise Cancellation feature identifies the user’s voice then eliminates every other type of noise that doesn’t match the voice. The feature dampens any external noise as long as it does not match the voice. This includes sound produced by the ceiling fans, children, door slams, etc. Moreover, it can calculate the distance between the source of the noise and the microphone. Hence, it’ll be much easier to distinguish between your voice and external sound.
How disruptive noise is filtered out
The machine learning model adapts for amplitude to determine what to filter out. Noise suppression used by other video conferencing apps can only identify common sounds such as keyboard keystrokes. Google Meet’s feature uses Artificial Intelligence to distinguish sounds making it more advanced than the other apps.
This is an impressive step forward in limiting interruptions while users are in a meeting. If you pay close attention to the sound produced when the noise cancellation feature is inactive and when it is active, you’ll definitely hear the difference.
How to enable the Noise Cancellation feature
Enabling this feature on the Google Meet app is very easy. As a matter of fact, you can choose to do it before a meeting starts or during the meeting. Below are steps on how to enable the feature.
To enable Noise Cancellation before a meeting.
- From the Homepage, go to settings (Click on the cog icon located at the top right corner of the app)
- You’ll see two tabs, one for Audio and the other for video. Click on the Audio tab
- Under microphone, you’ll see the Noise cancellation option, simply click on the greyed toggle button to turn it on.
- The greyed toggle button will turn to green, meaning the feature is active.
To enable Noise Cancellation during a meeting.
- While in a meeting, tap the three vertical dots found at the bottom right corner of the app.
- On the list of options, click on Settings.
- You’ll see two tabs, one for Audio and the other for video. Click on the Audio tab.
- Under microphone, you’ll see the Noise cancellation option, simply click on the greyed toggle button to turn it on.
- The greyed toggle button will turn to green, meaning the feature is active.
How to turn off the Noise Cancellation feature
Google Meet’s Background Noise Cancellation feature is turned on by default for all devices using the platform. However, there’ll be no visual indication that the feature is turned on to keep the software interface as clean as possible. Users can still choose to turn it off by following the steps below.
- Open Google Meet app/website
- Go to Settings (Click on the cog icon located at the top right corner of the app)
- You’ll see two tabs, one for Audio and the other for video. Click on the Audio tab
- Under microphone, you’ll see the Noise cancellation option, simply click on the toggle button to turn it off.
- The greyed-out toggle switch means that the feature is inactive/turned off.
How Noise cancellation sounds like
If you don’t have G Suite Enterprise or G Suite Enterprise for Education users, you can watch a demonstration of how the feature works in a demo video produced by VentureBeat. Serge Lachapelle, G Suite director of product management, demonstrates how the feature can seamlessly dampen external noise.
He used common noises such as wrapper crinkling, pen clicking, and glass clinking to demonstrate the efficiency of the feature. When the feature is activated, users can’t hear the noise, but his voice clarity is unaffected. Data processing is done in the cloud; hence it can work on a wide range of hardware.
Users data privacy and security
When it comes to user’s data privacy and safety, Lachapelle emphasized that the data will be encrypted, and Google will not use external meetings to train its AI model. On the contrary, it will use customer feedback to improve the feature over time. It is important to point out that the feature is not 100% perfect, meaning that it can’t cancel out all noise by just detecting human voices and dampening any other sound.
There are some use cases that noise doesn’t need to be canceled out, such as when laughing or clapping. Google is planning to improve the feature over time after the gradual rollout is done. The machine learning model is in the cloud so as to have the same Noise Cancellation experience for all devices.
Scheduled Release and Availability
Currently, not all devices have the feature; only select G Suite users can access the feature. Google hasn’t rolled out the Noise Cancellation feature for mobile devices; it’ll be made available to all smartphone users soon.
The Noise Cancellation Feature is only available to G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education users. Google has further disclosed that they will roll out the feature on Google Meet Web Client before mobile devices. It is still unclear when the Noise cancellation feature will be available to Personal Google accounts.