Comment by everfrustrated
1 year ago
I can't speak for this implementation, but on MacOS, the beamforming is amazing. When used in a noise office or cafe environment it eliminates background noise to an extent I can always tell if a colleague is using it or their worse headphone mic.
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!
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
3 replies →
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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