As video and remote meetings become a more common everyday occurrence, companies are searching for ways to make their discussions more productive. Video conferencing software with file and screen sharing services are a good start, but anywhere workers are still struggling with limiting the distractions in a non-office environment.
In recent months, Microsoft and its competitors have introduced things like virtual meeting rooms and virtual backgrounds to replace the visual distractions in the conference space. Now, as Tom Arbuthnot has shared on LinkedIn in late October, Microsoft is taking audio distractions into account too.
What Can We Expect from AI Noise Suppression?
Microsoft Teams is currently the most popular enterprise collaboration tool on the market. The service is offering access to crucial tools for video conversations and real-time teamwork to more than 75 million daily active users. With AI-enhanced noise suppression, meetings on Microsoft Teams stand to get even better.
Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft MVP, posted an image from the Microsoft roadmap on LinkedIn highlighting the arrival of AI-based real-time noise suppression coming to Teams soon. According to the roadmap information, the feature will automatically remove any “unwelcome” noise in the background of your meetings.
The technology will work by analysing the audio feeds in your meetings. Using deep neural networks, the service will then separate human speech signals from the surrounding noise. Microsoft estimates that a release will be ready by December 2020.
Reducing the Headaches of Working Anywhere
The arrival of real-time noise suppression could be an important step forward for Microsoft Teams. Although many companies are embracing anywhere work right now, most are still struggling with the unique challenges that a non-office environment delivers. It’s difficult to focus on a meeting when you have the sound of your dog barking in the background, or the noise of a neighbour cutting their grass to contend with.
AI-enhanced noise cancellation promises to rid us of the excess background noise that can get in the way of successful meetings. This could mean that employees spend less time hitting the mute button when they’re in business discussions. We all know how easy it is to forget to hit mute when you mean to or unmute yourself before you begin talking.
The new feature was added to Microsoft’s Teams roadmap on the 14th of October. It’s not the first evidence of companies experimenting with noise suppression we’ve seen, however. Zoom also has various noise suppression features to explore, and Cisco Webex announced a noise detection and suppression feature for Webex in March of this year.
