Skype gets Noise cancellation feature: Here’s how to activate during calls

Microsoft has come up with a new feature for its platform Skype. This time, it has brought noise cancellation to its desktop version.

In the blog post, the Skype team states that this tech was originally made for Microsoft Teams. “We are pleased to announce the release of our latest background noise suppression feature in the Skype desktop app. Originally developed for Microsoft Teams, this new feature is designed to silence just about everything except for your voice when you’re meeting on Skype,” it added.

The new feature can be found under the ‘Settings’ option and can be toggled with different options - Auto, Low and High.

Notably, the noise cancellation feature is not yet available on the web version or mobile versions of Skype but you can get it in Windows desktop apps and on Mac as well.

The blog post further added that the new noise cancellation tech works by analysing your audio feed and using trained deep neural networks to remove the noise without affecting the speaker’s voice. 

“This technology relies on machine learning (ML) to learn the difference between clean speech and noise and is frequently referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). A representative dataset is used to train the ML model to work in most of the situations our Skype users experience. There needs to be enough diversity in the dataset in terms of the clean speech, noise types, and the environments from which our users are joining online calls,” states the post.