[HN Gopher] How Google Meet's noise cancellation works
___________________________________________________________________
How Google Meet's noise cancellation works
Author : theanirudh
Score : 198 points
Date : 2020-06-09 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (venturebeat.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (venturebeat.com)
| xchaotic wrote:
| I am still waiting until AI reaches the ultimate in noise
| cancelling- that meeting could have been an email. AI will
| automatically send meeting cancellation and most likely meeting
| notes.
| jokoon wrote:
| Weirdly, it seems the simplest phones already solved those
| problem a long time ago.
|
| Seems like over-engineering. The issue is either with the
| microphone, with the hi-def stuff or something else.
|
| Every normal phone never had an inch of a problem, so I'm really
| confused why computers have this issue.
| bigtones wrote:
| I was not so impressed with this demo - especially when he was
| scrunching his potato chip packet, the degradation in his voice
| quality made it almost impossible to understand what he was
| saying and his voice sounded very synthesized and processed, and
| that's through a $200 Yeti professional microphone. Seems like
| some of the other noise cancellation technology options from
| Nvidia RTX and others are more effective.
| jack_pp wrote:
| However that wasn't a realistic scenario, you are unlikely to
| talk while scrunching plastics, ideally you should get muted
| 100% when you do it.
|
| Only way this could happen is if someone is standing 3 feet
| away from you and does it while you talk which would just be
| rude and probably be stopped by you immediately anyway.
|
| I'm more curious how this could work in the metro or with a
| washing machine nearby
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Yeti microphones pick up _everything_. If anything it would
| make the test more difficult.
| vkou wrote:
| You are correct. The sound quality of Nvidia RTX is amazing,
| compared to this.
|
| Unfortunately, you need a $400 graphics card, and >100 watts of
| power to run RTX...
| sp332 wrote:
| Unofficially, it's pretty easy to get it to run on non-RTX
| nvidia GPUs. https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-rtx-voice-
| performance/
| bhauer wrote:
| Not only that, but even when running RTX Voice on a GTX,
| the amount of GPU horsepower used is miniscule; it hardly
| even registers. The fans on my GTX 9-series GPU don't turn
| on when running RTX Voice.
| bentcorner wrote:
| +1. I'm using it on a 1060 and I've monitored sensors
| with OpenHardwareMonitor while RTX Voice is running. The
| only observable effect is that my GPU's clocks are turned
| up, there isn't even any significant load.
| cecja wrote:
| My RTX 2080ti uses 5 Watt idle and 15 Watt with RTX Voice.
| Stop spewing FUD.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Microphone quality has very little to do with it. Noise
| separation is just an incredibly hard problem, particularly
| when a noise is loud. Scrunching potato chips, there's no
| scenario where his voice won't become degraded unless you can
| isolate the scrunching sound separately (microphone beamforming
| can help here, but is still never perfect).
|
| Running this economically on servers at scale in realtime, I
| consider this very impressive. I can't say how it compares with
| RTX, but I wonder if it has anything to do with the amount of
| computing resources that can be dedicated to it. A single
| expensive card dedicated to one audio stream, versus a single
| Google server than needs to process hundreds (thousands?) of
| audio streams.
| miki123211 wrote:
| To all those here who complain about algorithms messing with
| their audio when they don't want them to. Use an app called
| TeamTalk. It lets you disable all that processing, so it works
| great for high-quality music transmission etc. I have no
| affiliation with them, I have been using it for a few years and
| I'm very happy.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I've been doing online guitar lessons since Covid-19 started and
| all these algorithms just suck hard for that. Even in a 1:1 call.
|
| Two repeated notes and the noise cancellation just immediately
| shuts you down... we've been using Zoom and luckily you can turn
| all the audio processing off if you go in "Advanced" and enable
| "Turn on original audio".
| Vaslo wrote:
| Or you could just mute your damn phones
| pier25 wrote:
| As someone with 2 dogs this is going to be a good reason to
| switch to Meet whenever possible.
| ruffrey wrote:
| Serious question - what's the risk that someone with a high
| pitched, outside-the-norm voice will get denoised? If it filters
| out kids in the background, will kids no longer be able to use
| google meet?
| bradstewart wrote:
| I haven't been able to confirm this, but I swear it happens to
| my mom on Zoom. When I video chat my family on Zoom and she
| isn't sitting directly in front of the laptop, her words rarely
| come through. I can see her lips moving, I can hear my dad
| grunting in agreement next to her--but she's silent. If they
| switch places, I can hear my dad without issue.
|
| I don't know if it's a combination of her cheap hardware or
| what, but it's... odd.
|
| EDIT: grammar
| arielserafini wrote:
| I think the key here is "in the background". I would assume if
| you're speaking close to the microphone, with no other voices
| going on, it will not filter anything.
| [deleted]
| arielserafini wrote:
| I'd say this is more like a demo. From the "how it works" in the
| title I was expecting to see some implementation details.
|
| Edit: I had only watched the video. The article does indeed
| contain a lot more detail.
| notatoad wrote:
| from the "venturebeat.com" domain though, this is about what i
| would have expected.
| stefan_ wrote:
| This is not the time to be snarky, I think we should
| congratulate the Google Meet team on placing this great
| article, not to mention the obnoxious integrations into other
| beloved Google products.
|
| Can't wait to see what the Google _Duo_ team will come up
| with in response. I mean, we saw the blog post on their great
| new video codec (AOMedia Video 1 was it?) but I personally
| felt it left much to be desired.
|
| What happened to the Hangout guys? Are they still in this
| one? Product middle management wants to be wooed.
| Orphis wrote:
| Duo is targeted to the general public and has E2E
| encryption though, so cloud denoising is not a possibility.
| mav3rick wrote:
| Ah the HN way keep putting down technical achievement just
| because it goes against a personal agenda.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Might be interesting to train the model using user's own voice.
| Maybe this would help filtering out co-workers in open office or
| family members.
|
| Maybe you could also use this personal model to hide very short
| network interruptions. Other party could use this model to
| constantly predict my next piece of audio and switch to
| prediction in case packet is lost.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Most people have no idea of the amount of incredibly advanced
| signal processing that goes into echo cancellation and noise
| cancellation in videoconferencing.
|
| This post is on noise cancellation specifically, and it actually
| has the potential to be a _huge_ step forward.
|
| One of the big audio problems with group meetings is that the
| background noise from each participant adds up, to a point where
| it quickly becomes unbearable. For that reason, videoconferencing
| generally only plays audio from one or two participants at most,
| using a fairly simple estimation of whichever audio signal is
| currently loudest. The problem is that this can make it really
| hard to interrupt (people will literally not hear you), or tell
| the difference between two people going "mm-hmm" versus the whole
| group. If you've ever been in a group meeting where everybody
| applauds something, this is why you _see_ everyone applauding but
| only hear a smattering.
|
| But if this noise cancellation really succeeds, it could be a
| huge leap forward because audio cues and overlap will actually
| work for the first time -- hearing the "mm-hmms", hearing
| everyone pipe up, and so on. Videoconferencing will feel more
| like an actual single shared audio environment, rather than the
| kind of "walkie-talkie" effect it so often feels like now.
|
| I'm really looking forward to this.
| amelius wrote:
| Hasn't the problem been solved decades ago, with car-kits?
|
| It seems that what's old is new again ...
| qmmmur wrote:
| No, not even close. The problem space is still mostly
| unsolved.
| krapht wrote:
| Of all companies poised to solve it, I think Apple could do
| it if they wanted. They could embed microphones in the
| laptop frame and integrate it with the camera as a premium
| feature, since they control the hardware and software
| stack.
|
| It's more practical than a touch bar, at least.
| throwaway9482 wrote:
| What's a car-kit? Just googled but didn't find anything
| relevant
| amelius wrote:
| Those adapters that let you use your phone through the
| audio system of your car (adapter does the noise-
| cancelling).
| throwaway9482 wrote:
| Ah I see never heard of them
| pathseeker wrote:
| No, as evidenced by the fact that you can almost always hear
| when a participant calls in from their car. When they start
| talking, you hear the road noise in the background.
|
| The only thing car-kits seemed to do was add minimum cut-offs
| before transmitting and make use of directional microphones.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| What do you mean by car-kits?
| microcolonel wrote:
| Any thoughts on spatialization or panning? I feel like it could
| help a lot, but also making it a good experience could involve
| head tracking, since most people are (hopefully) not accustomed
| to speaking in a different direction than the person they're
| speaking to.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I used to use panning back when I played WoW "seriously" and
| did 25 man raids, it makes hectic audio chat sooo much more
| clear. Some gaming voice apps can dynamically pan voices in
| 3D to match where the characters are, but I didn't use any of
| that. Just simply putting Guild Leader center, Tanks ~25%
| right, Healers ~25% left, and then randomly throwing everyone
| else somewhere wider in the stereo field. It sounds like an
| actual group of people rather than a single overlapping mono
| mess.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| A podcast I listen to with 4-5 people talking in a room
| does that with its audio. It sounds like a good idea, but
| in practice, it drives me nuts and makes me feel like I
| have plugged ears. I always enable mono audio when I listen
| to it.
|
| I think if it was dynamic, where turning my head towards
| the person speaking balanced the audio (like in real life),
| I would not have a problem with it. A super simple form of
| virtual reality that would only require a simple head-
| mounted gyroscope or motion sensor.
|
| Another podcast I listen to has two people with very
| similar voices, and I sometimes have a hard time figuring
| out who's speaking, so I welcome any advancements in this
| space.
| tomlagier wrote:
| How did you set this up?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| It was built into whichever voice-chat software we were
| using, just a simple right-click action. This was a long
| time ago, so I don't totally remember, probably 2008-2012
| or so? Trying to jog my memory with Google and I think it
| was TeamSpeak and the "3D Sound" feature. I feel like
| Mumble may also have been able to do this.
| tomlagier wrote:
| That's a really cool idea, thanks for the heads up.
| Didn't realize it was possible but man would it make a
| world of difference in meetings.
| baq wrote:
| i hope product managers of ms teams/zoom/meets are reading
| this thread, this is pure gold right here
| krapht wrote:
| I dream of the day when our laptops come with an integrated
| microphone array with automatic beamforming based on head
| tracking.
| lowdose wrote:
| I wish Tinder came with the ability to beam me up.
| microcolonel wrote:
| I mean, automatic beamforming microphones are actually
| fairly common now, in laptops. Head tracking is probably a
| detour if your goal is just to get good clear voice input.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| This will be a game changer on online gaming, too (pun
| intended, I guess). I don't even like playing games that
| require headsets and teamwork because the background noise
| makes my ears physically hurt after long enough.
| rb808 wrote:
| I wish everyone would just get a headset. It drives me nuts
| when people call me on speakerphone, of course they never hear
| the problem.
| pas wrote:
| Tell them you can't hear them due to noise, tell them to pick
| up the phone or plug in a headset, etc.
| the_af wrote:
| > _The problem is that this can make it really hard to
| interrupt (people will literally not hear you)_
|
| This is driving me crazy with Google Meet in these COVID19
| times. Even in a relatively small conference, I have a really
| hard time interrupting someone to ask a quick question, even
| when the speaker is expecting interruptions. It's always
| "excuse me!"; delay as person continues speaking; I stop; the
| other person says "yes, please ask away"; when I restart my
| question the other person already assumed I've changed my mind
| and continues speaking; repeat ad infinitum. And this is _if_
| they even hear me over the audio breaking up.
|
| It's very, very frustrating. If they solve this it would hugely
| improve quality of life in remote conferencing for me.
| 01100011 wrote:
| It would be nice if there was a 'raise your hand' button
| which put you in a queue to speak. Even better if it let you
| take a quick note in case you forget what you wanted to say.
| closeparen wrote:
| I always feel this with Zoom. Interestingly it did not seem
| to be an issue on a recent Discord call.
| kenhwang wrote:
| Discord targets gaming which absolutely prioritizes low-
| latency. Zoom has a very noticeable amount of latency which
| makes it really awkward to have multiple people talking at
| the same time.
| closeparen wrote:
| Is Zoom picking some other point on an optimization
| curve, and if so, what's more important to it?
|
| Or is it just worse?
| kenhwang wrote:
| Zoom seems to be optimizing for bandwidth use, and by
| extension, cost to them. Its typical use case is a shared
| office internet connection.
|
| Discord users are more likely to have a dedicated fast
| internet connection and doesn't seem to care about
| profitability at the moment.
|
| It's just the difference in designing for a 100/10
| connection to yourself vs sharing a 100/100 connection
| with 20 other people. Zoom reasonably gracefully degrades
| on choppy/slow connections while Discord becomes straight
| up unusable.
| matsemann wrote:
| We're trying karaoke through Zoom tomorrow as a standup
| gag, wonder how that will work with the delay haha.
| notatoad wrote:
| my perception with zoom (only based use, not actual
| knowledge of how it works) is that it has two modes: one
| where it tries to isolate the speaker and auto-mute
| everybody else, and another where it can't figure out who
| the speaker is and just lets all audio through. so if
| everybody on the call is singing together, it should all
| come through.
| gxqoz wrote:
| Does anyone have more details on Zoom vs. Discord
| latency? We've been experimenting with Zoom and Discord
| for online trivia tournaments where if one participant
| had better latency than another that would give a big
| advantage. I'm sure that has to happen on any platform,
| but if there's a bigger variance on one platform vs. the
| other that would be good to know.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah, I wish there was a simple non-verbal option to signal
| intent-to-talk.
|
| I want to just be able to hit my self-view and have it have a
| big icon on it or something so the person currently speaking
| (and everyone else) can see that I want to say something.
| Maybe sort these in chronological order so the speaker can
| see who wanted to talk first?).
|
| In theory you could do this with a good chat, but for some
| reason the chat in Zoom and the others is kind of an
| afterthought and nobody uses it.
|
| One of the reasons I prefer text based chat is multiple
| people can talk at the same time without needing to deal with
| interrupting audio. If you can type well, the bandwidth is
| higher for group communication (and you get a log).
|
| At least with video you can kind of tell when someone is
| waiting to speak by seeing their expression. Audio only is
| worse (but maybe wouldn't be, if you had good intent-to-speak
| tools built into the app?)
| erichurkman wrote:
| We rolled out
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nod-reactions-
| for-... to all of our devices. The quick 'raise hand'
| button is great for what you're looking for.
| ghaff wrote:
| >At least with video you can kind of tell when someone is
| waiting to speak by seeing their expression. Audio only is
| worse (but maybe wouldn't be, if you had good intent-to-
| speak tools built into the app?)
|
| Which is one good reason to use video. At least with
| smaller meetings, someone can raise their hand or just look
| really pained. (Bigger meetings, you probably need to use
| chat.)
| kooshball wrote:
| >Yeah, I wish there was a simple non-verbal option to
| signal intent-to-talk.
|
| this is a solved problem. webex has had a hand raise
| feature for a decade now. trivial for google to just copy.
| boogies wrote:
| I really like how Jitsi Meet puts the hand raising/lowering
| button right on the bottom bar, where there's just empty
| black/white space in Zoom/Google Meet, and not buried
| inside a menu labeled "Participants" (???), where it's a
| hassle to access (Zoom).
| llampx wrote:
| Microsoft Teams has a "raise your hand" function that's
| pretty handy.
| crazygringo wrote:
| If the speaker did hear you interrupt, then that's actually a
| latency issue, not a noise/mixing issue.
|
| When a conference call is made up of people all in the same
| city on decent internet connections, latency is usually not a
| big issue.
|
| But when a conference call has people from New York, San
| Francisco, and Japan on it, even if it's only 3 participants,
| latency can be bad just because of the speed of light,
| essentially (on top of what is otherwise reasonable
| hardware/software latency). Latency may be bad even if you're
| talking with a colleague in the same city, since the audio is
| "mixed" on the server, and that server might be across the
| world if a participant from across the world started the
| meeting. (Counterintuitively, the latency with your local
| colleague could be _twice_ as bad as with the colleague from
| across the world.)
| the_af wrote:
| You're probably right! Though I've just experienced this
| issue with three participants, all in the same city (not in
| the US though). It's really annoying.
| avianlyric wrote:
| I've experienced some pretty horrific latency in Google
| Meet that seemed to originate from my local device, where
| only my connection would suffer from high latency.
|
| Typical restart-all-the-things usually made it go away.
| But it wasn't unusual for 500ms of latency to slowly
| build up during a 30min call. Unfortunately I have
| nothing more useful to add, the issue resolved itself
| before I could track down a definitive cause.
| bdamm wrote:
| Bluetooth.
|
| Stop using it.
|
| Without even looking at your setup, I would bet $100
| minimum that it's Bluetooth latency. It adds a lot of
| latency, 500ms is not unusual, and many folks have no
| idea that all that latency is really just the last 18
| inches. This is why you're seeing more and more cases
| where people are using good old iPhone wired earphone for
| conference calling, especially when skyping a TV
| interview.
| close04 wrote:
| This is also a problem of people not understanding that
| audio conferences aren't just a regular conference but
| with headphones.
|
| There are a few things that most meetings could benefit
| from. Having an organizer who's aware of the differences
| between leading an in person meeting and a remote
| meeting, cutting video to save bandwidth if the meeting
| doesn't absolutely need it (the organizer can usually
| just disable the function), _muting when you 're not
| speaking_ (by far _the best_ quality of life improvement,
| can be done silently by the organizer if someone is just
| doing their Vader impersonation throughout the meeting),
| using the "raise hand" function (again, the organizer
| plays a huge role here), using the native app instead of
| the web one usually provides better quality and
| performance, using a wired connection instead of wireless
| if possible, sometimes even starting meetings at non-
| standard hours (like 15 to/past the hour) helps avoid the
| rush of people logging in at the same time, etc.
| blackoil wrote:
| You can check your WiFi and try with an ethernet cable.
| Wifi has tendency to add unpredictable latency.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| This applies to everyone on the call
| jmole wrote:
| The biggest reason for this is people not using headsets. If
| someone is just using their laptop speakers and mic, Meet
| will prioritize the mic if they're talking and will duck any
| audio that comes through the speakers.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| 100%. I wrote a post about this (among other basic tweaks)
| a couple of months ago: http://jonpurdy.com/2020/03/how-to-
| improve-your-zoomskype-te...
|
| I have some screenshots of waveforms showing laptop mic vs
| headset, and the signal-to-noise ratio with the headset
| destroys even good noise-cancelling using a laptop mic
| that's farther away from one's mouth.
| znpy wrote:
| I have headsets and tried pretty much everything. there's
| always background noise from me. I'm even using the audio
| cable with my bluetooth (!) headsets, turning bluetooth
| off.
|
| I don't know what else I can do.
| rob-olmos wrote:
| I use a Plantronics Legend bluetooth headset, which is
| pretty good at cutting out background noise. Tested with
| a phone.
|
| Cheaper bluetooth headsets seem to pick up everything
| around them. Had that issue with a coworker where the
| headset was worse than using the internal mic.
|
| Biggest and annoying issue though is consistent bluetooth
| disconnect/reconnect issues even on different MacOS
| machines. Latest firmware and such. Pretty sure it's not
| 2.4ghz interference.
| gxqoz wrote:
| I've heard that the original Bluetooth standard is pretty
| terrible for audio, especially for microphones. On
| Windows PCs at least, old protocols can cause a bad
| experience:
|
| "Modern high-end Bluetooth headsets support AptX, an
| audio codec compression scheme that offers better sound
| quality. But AptX is only enabled if it's supported on
| both the transmitter and receiver. When using a Bluetooth
| headset with a PC, it only works if your PC's hardware
| and drivers are compatible."
| (https://www.howtogeek.com/354321/why-bluetooth-headsets-
| are-...)
|
| Not sure if this applies to a Mac though.
| rectang wrote:
| There can still be background noise, but if you're
| wearing a headset there is not a feedback loop where
| noise from the _other_ participants gets looped through
| your mic and speakers.
|
| Participants often don't realize that they're the culprit
| when _somebody else_ sounds terrible.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| So much this. I'm almost at the point of stating that echo
| cancellation has done more harm than good, because we are
| now in a situation where 80% of people have no idea that
| wearing earbuds could make a tremendous difference in call
| quality, and everyone just expects the software to
| magically take care of it.
|
| Sadly, the software does not just magically take care of
| it. Anytime two people talk, a typical echo canceler just
| starts decimating frequencies until both of them are
| unintelligible.
|
| Add in a couple of clueless teams who mount a camera/mic
| against a conference room wall and introduce massive
| amounts of room echo into the mix, and I'm at the point
| where a conference call becomes an absolutely mentally
| exhausting experience just trying to decipher what is being
| said. I have no hope of contributing, because I can only
| hear 2/3 of the syllables, and my brain is running on
| overdrive trying to turn those back into words. By the time
| I've figured out what they just said, they're half-way into
| the next sentence. What a stressful hellscape.
|
| Ironically, if we had no echo cancellation, it would force
| everyone to use ear buds, and the average call quality
| would be a lot better.
| skybrian wrote:
| Some folks find that switching from WiFi to Ethernet for your
| home office can help:
|
| https://www.jefftk.com/p/ethernet-is-worth-it-for-video-
| call...
| bdamm wrote:
| 100% agree. Latency is a killer to natural conversation so
| if you want to be your best on a conference call, no Wi-Fi
| and no Bluetooth.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I think part of the problem is that the tooling and the
| societal norms still need to evolve. The tooling is getting
| there - Zoom/Teams (I don't know about Meets) have buttons to
| communicate out-of-band beyond just text chat. We need to
| have more of that, I imagine eventually we'll have a wide
| range of ways to express ourselves (and customs/norms to
| match). Although I don't know if that'll happen before most
| people stop working from home.
| jfim wrote:
| > Even in a relatively small conference, I have a really hard
| time interrupting someone to ask a quick question, even when
| the speaker is expecting interruptions. It's always "excuse
| me!"; delay as person continues speaking; I stop; the other
| person says "yes, please ask away"; when I restart my
| question the other person already assumed I've changed my
| mind and continues speaking; repeat ad infinitum.
|
| One way to solve this is to have the speaker name the person,
| and then wait until that person speaks. For example, if
| someone interrupts: Speaker: [Talks]
| Person A: Excuse me! Speaker: Yes, Mr. A? [waits]
| Person A: What about X?
|
| Or if there are two people talking at the same time
| Speaker: [Talks] Person A and B: Excuse me!
| Speaker: Yes, Mr. A? Mr. B, I'll come back to you after A.
| [waits] Person A: What about X? Speaker:
| [Talk about X]. Mr B, you were saying? Person B: What
| about Y?
|
| Treat it as a synchronization problem, with the speaker
| breaking the ties. As long as it's obvious to everyone whose
| turn it is to speak, it works well (assuming people aren't
| too rowdy/impolite).
| m463 wrote:
| there are products that do this now with all kinds of apps:
|
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice...
|
| I think you can do it not only to your microphone (outgoing
| audio), but to the other participants in the meeting (incoming
| audio)
| Terretta wrote:
| See also https://krisp.ai
|
| Mute your or participants' background noise in any
| communication app
|
| https://krisp.ai/technology/
| dmos62 wrote:
| That's exciting. Isn't this difficulty one of the reasons why
| open-source VOIP clients are rare?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > videoconferencing generally only plays audio from one or two
| participants at most
|
| I have noticed this and I __hate __it. It makes normal
| conversation absolutely impossible.
|
| Discord, which is an audio first product, is much better than
| other solutions in this regard and their video conferencing
| while new has been very enjoyable to use.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Most people have no idea of the amount of incredibly advanced
| signal processing that goes into echo cancellation and noise
| cancellation in videoconferencing.
|
| We pretty much take echo cancellation for granted at this
| point. Using something better than your laptop microphone on a
| call is still a good idea but I'm not sure that wearing
| headphones/earphones is that big a deal at this point.
|
| You don't need to go back _that_ far until speakerphones other
| than very expensive Polycoms and the like were pretty mediocre
| at cutting out because of echo.
| neximo64 wrote:
| Any battery life tests of this tech on phones?
| kccqzy wrote:
| None. Because the processing doesn't happen on a phone.
|
| > When you're on a Google Meet call, your voice is sent from
| your device to a Google datacenter, where it goes through the
| machine learning model on the TPU, gets reencrypted, and is
| then sent back to the meeting.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| I might be unusual, but my experience with videoconferencing has
| been that ambient noise is rarely a major problem. The big issue
| is audio cutting out due to a shaky network. When ambient noise
| is a problem, it's not so much someone typing as their spouse
| talking in the background or a fire engine going by -- and at
| that point the solution is for them to hit mute.
| gav wrote:
| Most of the issues I have with ambient noise on call could be
| solved with people investing in a better headset. It's a
| significant improvement over using your laptop's built in one.
|
| The issue I find a bigger problem is lag causing people to talk
| over one another. I've been on a lot of calls where the call
| quality was fine but conversations were difficult because it
| was hard to judge when the other person had stopped talking.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| All voip seems to have terrible latency and it's so
| frustrating! Mumble does a _really_ good job with this and
| has for years, why can 't we get that in a mainstream
| solution?
| kyriakos wrote:
| In my experience kids randomly talking is worse than any
| constant background noise.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _at that point the solution is for them to hit mute_
|
| From a technical point of view, that is really the best thing.
| It works, and sometimes it's the only thing that works.
|
| But if you try to get people actually do it, you run into
| problems:
|
| (1) They don't realize it's them. AFAIK the system doesn't play
| their audio back to them, so while everyone else hears the
| noise, they don't. The one person who needs to take action is
| the one person who doesn't know action is necessary.
|
| (2) They are distracted. When their spouse is talking, they are
| focused on whatever their spouse is saying, not on how it
| affects the meeting audio. Or the meeting is boring and they're
| not paying attention.
|
| (3) They just don't care enough. They are there to attend a
| meeting, not fiddle with computer stuff. Some people will never
| take the time to learn where the mute button is in the
| software.
|
| Perhaps #1 could be improved, though, with some kind of
| blindingly obvious indicator in the UI. If "YOUR MIC IS WHAT
| EVERYONE IS HEARING RIGHT NOW" flashes when your mic takes the
| floor, maybe you'd notice it lighting up when you didn't intend
| for it to.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| AWS Chime has significant drawbacks, but one of the things I
| most liked about it was that anybody could mute anybody else.
| The number of calls where that significantly cut down on
| audio discomfort was surprising.
|
| For those wondering, unmuting is a privileged operation that
| only the user could do themselves.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| An attentive moderator can address all these issues, but it's
| frustrating to be just a regular participant who can't mute
| others.
| trboyden wrote:
| Not very well. Watched a Google Meet meeting for the neighbor's
| Honor Society induction and the quality was horrible. Video kept
| freezing and audio cut in and out. Was probably only about a
| dozen attendees in the meeting room. Wasn't the neighbor's
| connection either, they have a solid Fios 200/200 service.
| thebeefytaco wrote:
| Did you even read the article? This is talking about a new
| noise cancelation feature being introduced today.
| xeno42 wrote:
| 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
| BadassFractal wrote:
| 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.
| bradstewart wrote:
| 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?
| woofcat wrote:
| >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.
| nuccy wrote:
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| 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.
| StavrosK wrote:
| It would also have to know where each of your ears is in
| relation to the microphone with millimeter accuracy.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| 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.
| meritt wrote:
| 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.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| +1
|
| 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.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| > Google also made a conscious decision to put the machine
| learning model in the cloud, which wasn't the immediately obvious
| choice.
|
| Oh good. Meet is already a _huge_ battery-hog on my laptop, so
| adding fancy signal processing client-side was worrying me.
| dekhn wrote:
| What I'd really like to see is effective source seperation and
| nulling. For example, if you could mute the screaming baby in the
| background of a VC speaker (this has been fairly common
| occurrence now that we are WFH and it's hard to get day care).
| cyrux004 wrote:
| I was really looking for the baby noise test in the demo, but I
| guess for now its human vs non-human cancellation ?
|
| Edit: apparently can also remove kids crying; just not included
| in demo
| david_draco wrote:
| It would be fun if it canceled out screaming.
|
| We somehow have this sexist social expectation that women who
| show their feelings (crying, screaming) are "hysterical" (really
| a nasty word) and not taken seriously. If so, men screaming
| should be equally considered a sign of immaturity and lack of
| self-control.
|
| Also could help with customers ("Sorry, I can't hear you!").
| skybrian wrote:
| > A musical instrument will probably also get filtered out. "To a
| pretty large degree, it does," Lachapelle said. "Especially
| percussion instruments. Sometimes a guitar can sound very much
| like a voice -- you're starting to touch the limits there. But if
| you have music playing in the background, usually it'll cut it
| all out."
|
| This is a big issue with hearing aids. The whole industry is
| focused on optimizing for voice intelligibility and as a musician
| you end up doing trial-and-error with the audiologist to turn all
| that stuff off.
|
| We need more open source hearing aids - I've read of a few but
| they're not mainstream.
| aaronAgain wrote:
| First, I'll say this to everyone: Get hearing aids if you need
| them. They can change your world.
|
| About music, this is getting much better in hearing aids. I've
| been from analog thru digital over 15+ years of hearing aids,
| and my latest (3 months ago) pair from Phonak (no affiliation)
| is an honest leap forward. It has a built in Music profile that
| disables all sound optimizations in general, while still
| attempting to correct the hearing ranges that you have a
| deficit in. I was on the verge of no longer being able to hear
| with hearing aids, that has probably been extended by 3-5 years
| with these new models. At that point I will be approaching
| cochlear implant level hearing loss. I happily embrace my
| cyborg future!
|
| On top of Music, I have a Walking profile that attempts to
| focus on the person that is walking to the left or right of my
| and can pick with side on the fly. And they make great ear
| plugs when things are loud.
|
| The Normal program, auto-magically selects between 8'ish
| profiles to pick the best one for the environment. And it has
| finally got it right. Older models I would daily need to force
| it into the best mode because it guessed wrong. The latest
| model I only have to tell it what to do once every few weeks.
|
| And to the original topic, noise cancellation, hearing aids
| bluetooth'ed to the phone/PC for conference calls is hands down
| the best possible audio experience. Built in noise
| cancellation, amazing microphones that can be used for your
| voice portion of the call, tuned to your hearing, with some of
| the finest sound output possible. Just amazing. These things
| are so good these days that they are finally being labeled as
| assistive devices for people without hearing loss. They can
| give someone with normal range hearing essentially bionic
| hearing. Tinnitus? They play customized white noise to make the
| ringing less noticeable. Doesn't help everyone, but it's really
| nice for me. I hear more ringing when I take my aids out.
|
| Oh, and it does all of this on a device that fits in your ear
| with a battery the size of a few grains of rice and all in a
| few milliseconds so your brain sees the mouth move at the same
| time it actually hears the audio.
|
| Again, get them if you need them.
| skybrian wrote:
| They have some great features and I agree that people should
| get them (or upgrade), but they are not optimized for
| musicians.
|
| I just got a similar model I assume (M90-R) and it's
| definitely not switching to music mode automatically when I
| play music. (Maybe it's different for listening.) I just had
| the audiologist add a music mode that I can switch to
| manually, but getting acceptable timbre for the instruments I
| play (accordion, melodica, and piano) is work in progress.
| Making an expensive instrument sound like cheap trash is
| disappointing, though of course I can take them out.
|
| Having Bluetooth is nice, particularly for phone calls, but I
| find the sound quality is unsatisfying for listening to
| music, so it won't be replacing speakers for me.
| tonystride wrote:
| This is also a problem with teaching online piano lessons,
| sometimes the piano gets filtered out and makes it hard to hear
| what the student is doing.
| secabeen wrote:
| Zoom has a "use original audio" toggle that helps a lot with
| this.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I don't know if a similar option is available for other
| products, but Zoom has a direct audio option:
| https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-
| us/articles/115003279466-Enabl...
| pierrebai wrote:
| As far as my experience goes, the single best way to deal with
| background noise is... the mute button.
|
| In every video conf I've been, you can instantly tell when "one
| of them" who can't be bothered to mute themselves joins. The
| audio quality immediately goes down the drain. It's always the
| same subset of people who do it, too. As soon as they're enjoined
| to please mute, the audio quality is restored.
|
| No amount of magic signal processing will ever match it.
|
| While perhaps misguided to use it that way, the mute button thus
| act as a social-clueness meter.
| leokennis wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree. I often Skype-call with a group of 10 and
| we all have perfect mute-discipline. It's just like a regular
| in person meeting, except there is just audio.
| Terretta wrote:
| "Hold space to talk" is not a bad solve for this, also makes
| folks ramble less.
| GhostVII wrote:
| I wonder how much benefit you would get from targeting specific
| microphone/speaker setups for noise cancelling rather than
| treating everything the same. I would imagine that the noise
| cancellation requirements are far different for someone video
| conferencing over a laptop mic and speaker versus a good pair of
| Bose headphones. If you could specify what type of device you are
| using it could tune the noise cancellation accordingly - if I am
| using a good pair of headphones, I don't need echo cancellation,
| but I still need to filter out some amount of background noise.
| newfeatureok wrote:
| None of this fancy technology is necessary IMO.
|
| Just implement push to talk with mute-by-default. 90% of the
| audio issues would be resolved. Another 5% could be solved by
| buying everyone a decent headset which hopefully has a push-to-
| talk button on it as well.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| In theory yes. But what about users that are mobile on a call
| and even when they "push" to talk, ambient noise from the
| metro, crowd, or traffic is present enough to be troubling?
|
| You don't always get to choose if background noise is present.
|
| Also, you just asked that people push a button, and wear a
| headset. That is a lot, and this is about lowering the bar
| needed to get a good experience.
| monkey26 wrote:
| Funny timing. Just got off my first Google Meet call an hour ago
| and was thinking they need to add noise cancellation. It was
| awful.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| We've been holding 25+ participant Teams sessions, and the only
| rules are that only one person can speak at a time and no one
| unmutes unless they're speaking. The noise cancellation might
| as well not even exist.
|
| Comparatively, I was impressed that we could even have a Meet
| without everyone needomg to be on mute.
| the_af wrote:
| I feel you! Did you also have your kid shouting in the
| background? If they found a way to specifically mute kids
| crying or shouting it would be a huge deal :P
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Everybody makes a stab at this, and very little of it works
| consistently. I applaud Google for attacking this head-on! It is
| a big issue and deserves attention.
|
| My biggest issue (when I worked in videoconferencing) was
| echoing, and locking onto the delay window where echoes could
| occur. Depending on the distance from a conference room speaker
| to all the walls, echoes could occur at one or more offsets
| (appear at microphone input with some delay after presenting at
| the speaker). And ambient noises could masquerade as echoes. The
| filters tend to be IIR filters, and get wound up easily. It was
| awful.
| m0zg wrote:
| > How Google Meet's noise cancellation works
|
| Very poorly. Of all the available alternatives (Zoom, Skype,
| FaceTime), Google Meet seems to have the worst audio _and_ video
| quality. This is inexplicable for a company very easily capable
| of technological and product leadership in both of those things.
| thebeefytaco wrote:
| Did you even read the article? This is talking about a new
| noise cancelation feature being introduced today.
| m0zg wrote:
| Quite obviously not, just like almost everybody else in the
| comments.
|
| Shouldn't the title be "How the _new_ Google Meet noise
| cancellation works" then?
| pkaye wrote:
| I need to get hearing aids soon and heard about all the advances
| and limitations. Particularly the problems with noise
| cancellation. I hope this kind of technology trickles into
| hearing aids also.
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