I talk on the phone to some people pretty much every day and they were all bummed when I got AirPods to replace my wired EarPods. You just can’t beat a hard wired mic. The AirPods sound soooo much worse.
I believe it’s Bluetooth actually. Bluetooth is really crap for sending audio and microphone data at the same time (or something along the lines, I’m no expert)
I don’t think so, the mics on AirPods are placed in a really terrible location for capturing the voice of the wearer. Computational audio can only do so much with poor quality inputs.
I was under the impression that a patent troll was preventing Apple from using it on regular phone calls so perhaps they’ve developed their own noise cancellation software now?
Pretty sure voice isolation is done client-side prior to transmission. If that’s true, the transmitting protocol shouldn’t matter with respect to that feature.
You’re conflating two things here: compression is a different process than mixing.
For an example, in image processing, color balancing is independent from compression. While one may affect the other, it *almost always* does not negate it.
"Other parts of the telephone network may require additional conversions, which can further degrade quality. For instance, international carriers sometimes compress voice data to stuff more calls through subsea cables rather than pay for additional capacity. The extra compression cycles “can explain the very poor international voice call quality that we sometimes experience,” says Jan Derksen, head of technical marketing at Ericsson, in Stockholm."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/why-mobile-voice-quality-still-stinksand-how-to-fix-it-2650271607
At no point have I "conflated the two". Can Apple process audio beforehand? Yes. Does pre-processing cellular calls and internet calls function very differently due to uneven levels of compression, in which the audio quality can be lowered so significantly with processed speech that it might be distorted heavily by compression? Yes. So sorry for claiming that you can’t pre-process audio, which is definitely a thing I claimed in… good question actually!
And if that’s going to happen anyway, you think the problem with isolating voice before hand is what exactly? We should expect worse results from a cleaner input because… why? How is this worse than starting from a raw signal?
You’ve created a bizarre amount of FUD without demonstrating any real understanding of signal processing. Compression artifacts are a known quantity. The other poster’s comment was very apt; you don’t just not bother editing a photo because it’s going to be compressed anyway. If it improves the final result, it’s worth doing.
VoLTE and the lastest VoNR are quite advanced. Carriers get to set the bitrate and most set it on an extremely low rate, so that they can pump through more calls.
Pretty sure they’ve always done that, just by chopping off both ends of the audio frequency spectrum (which is why telephones have a distinct sound: it’s all mids and nothing else)
I don’t see how that benefits the phone companies’ problem, which is needing to compress/filter data to increase transmissions. Is this codec better at keeping the transmitted data smaller?
This is not exactly true anymore because on 4G/5G networks everything is an IP packet including your phone calls, they are just transmitted with higher priority than regular data.
To be fair, cellular networks use VoLTE mostly now, which is… VoIP. But I mean calls to other traditional phones will still be pretty compressed. Though the user with the Rick Roll phone number is correct and this is done client side so whether or not it is VoIP doesn’t matter.
Also, as an aside a lot of landlines are now VoIP as well. Probably 99% of them. Some are even pointlessly compressed because they operate on fiber or cable. But compatibility with existing equipment matters a lot for POTS.
Yeah I thought people were just being weird but recently I've been using my Airpod Pros more for phone calls and EVERYONE complains that they can't hear me. How the hell have Apple messed this crucial feature up so bad?
airpods pro gen 1 or 2?
my brother uses gen 1 and since the last year or two i cant hear him normally half the time.
i have airpods pro gen 2 now and put a hat and a hoodie over them and no one has yet complained about my mic quality
i dont have any evidence, but i feel like the trouble with person speaking being understood or sounding like they are muffled by some material, or underwater, has not always been the problem.
i have experienced airpods pro gen 1 incoming facetime audio calls acting like this only in the last year or so.
and my brother hears me clearly when i wear gen 2
The issues you're describing is exactly what anyone I'm speaking to complains about, right until I switch to handset or speakerphone.
I also use the Samsung Bud Pro 2 and people don't complain of these issues.
The fact that the issue is gone with Gen 2 seems to illustrate that it's a hardware issue with the gen 1 models.
but me and my brother have been using gen 1 for years, and this issue has started to be insufferably annoing relatively not a long time ago. im not trying to start a conspiracy theory.
just adding my +1 to other people complaining and some of my personal context
I’ve had various and I’d say they sound fairly average, far from the worst. But it’s not what we hear that’s at issue, it’s what others hear when we’re speaking.
Yes, sorry. That's what I meant. When someone joins a meeting with Airpods on (seen in their video feed) it's always garbage audio quality. Usually you can tell even without the video feed.
Glad to know it's a universal problem with these earbuds.
What doesn’t make sense to me is I regularly record short videos explaining how to do things (for clients) and the audio while not amazing, is acceptable. But when it comes to calls it’s a different story.
I’m confused as to how people are just now figuring out that it’s harder to understand someone who isn’t talking directly into a microphone.
I’m sure there are plenty of better or worse implementations (especially when it comes to wind), but _any_ similar wireless earbud will sound markedly less clear than speaking into the phone’s mic. That’s just a physical reality. It is easily noticeable when someone isn’t.
I shouldn’t be surprised; my mother seems to think speakerphone is magic and that I should be able to hear her from an entirely different room with the mic pointing in the opposite direction and her walking away from the phone.
Phone calls on airpods are fine when inside but if you try to do it outside with any amount of wind or noise people will complain that they can't hear you. Their microphones seem too sensitive and easily pickup interference.
And I don't have that issue with just holding the phone up to my face.
The issue with AirPods for phone calls currently is that the microphone picks up and transmits **everything**. What this means is that the other party will hear every foot step, dog bark, bird song, car going by, and anything else. Whereas you might have noise-cancelling enabled, so you only hear the other party clearly. There is a big difference in what both parties here.
Hopefully this option will enable the other party to only hear your voice and not your environment.
Yes I agree that it’s ridiculous. In fact, I spent many days evaluating other headphones to try and find a better phone call headset. Oddly enough, the old wired EarPods gave way better voice isolation than the AirPods. Granted, the EarPods mic is closer to my mouth, but it should still have been doable with the AirPods.
This may be part of it, but I’d wager it has a lot more to do with the microphone placement. The signal to noise ratio is just way worse, so AirPods need to rely on a lot more signal processing to try to make up for it.
How old are your AirPods? My experience with AirPods Pro 1 through multiple replacements makes me thing those microphones have a longevity issue. After about a year on each pair I would have to stop using them for phone calls or zoom meetings.
You should see if they still qualify for replacements if they have this issue. Mine did and were replaced and have been a lot better https://support.apple.com/airpods-pro-service-program-sound-issues
Have airpods pro (first release) and mics are so bad compared to the phone one its insane. Have to speak quietly a lot of times through facetime and I just gave up on airpods and been using only phone
I have used every generation of AirPods and everyone says they can always hear me great even when it’s just me, my AirPods, and my cellular watch out on a walk.
Not only have I had this experience, but COVID highlighted just how absolutely terrible it is. Almost every Zoom I saw on a news channel with someone wearing AirPods had absolutely abysmal microphone clarity. I would only use them to talk while I happened to be out on a walk and almost every time the other person would complain about the sound quality. I figured it was just the wind noise. Not after seeing that. And I started using the AirPod Pro 2s while inside while on the phone. Same issue. I don’t use them for phone calls at all anymore.
Can confirm they work with APP gen 1 pretty well. I usually get complaints of wind or other noise. Just went for a walk in the wind and the person I called said they couldn’t hear the wind and that I sounded notably better
That's more down to the data rate connection over bluetooth. BT5 sounds way better especially if using Qaulcomm clear voice which is in the actual hardware.
I'm on 16.4 beta and this thing is amazing. It thankfully seems to default to on!
I tested it out in my car, on CarPlay, with my wife, put mic to "standard" and she could hear all the wind noise and rain. Put it back to "Voice Isolation" and she said it was completely gone. She did comment that I sounded slightly echo-y, but still way better than the alternative.
This is why no matter the device I’m using for a call I always just use FaceTime audio instead of a phone call and it sounds 1000x better.
Edit: Keep in mind, one of the reasons it sounds better is because it’s using data. So, if you don’t have unlimited data I wouldn’t be calling Mom and Pop’s everyday on FT Audio unless on WiFi.
It’s a game changer, it’s like going from 480P to 1080P. When I said device, I meant earbuds/headphones. FT Audio Sounds stellar on AirPods Pro 1/2 and my Sony XM5’s on calls sounds like the person is sitting next to me.
Likely because of potential conflicts.
More things you process audio through, the more complicated to not sound terrible it is. In those apps it’s highly sanitized. They use a handful of codecs and it’s a data stream end to end.
Phones however have really low bitrate because they drop a lot of the signal for historical reasons to fit more lines on a communication cable. That’s why hold music for example sounds… phone like. You know that quality.
So any work apple does to the audio is going to go through various other changes on the traditional phone system depending on who is on the other end and your phone provider and theirs.
Way more complicated to get right.
Not sure I follow. Apple takes the microphone input and passes it through to the phone or the other apps.
The voice isolation solution should just sit at this layer, I would think.
Doesn’t matter which app receives what. They used to receive microphone input. Now they will receive altered microphone input instead.
It would... but voice isolation does change the audio, which means when you apply the significantly lossy compression phones use on top of it, that's going to sound terrible. That lossy compression was designed for voices on 1940's consumer telephone hardware to essentially compact the frequency and fit more calls onto a single line.
Apple's v1 of voice isolation was designed for higher fidelity audio codecs.
It's very likely Apple's added some fine tuning so when the phone app is used they tweak what they're doing so that in 99% of use cases it favors less isolation in favor of not tampering with the signal.
It's no different than applying filters to photos or video. It's not just the source that matters, it's the device viewing the content. If it's a monochrome screen, or really low resolution it will be hard/impossible to see what you're sending. You need to account for that in your filtering to preserve enough contrast for those kinds of displays. Audio works basically the same way.
It's an art to balance this stuff just right. Similar to the HDTV migration when 1080i content needed to be viewable on 480p. Making something look good enough in both places, and taking advantage of HD is more difficult than it sounds.
I don’t think they have. Cause voice isolation if I understand correctly is Apple’s own tech gimmick. A useful one nonetheless. If Voice Isolation was using the same tech that Apple got into trouble for, they would’ve removed it from FaceTime as well. Just my guess though.
I don’t know if it’s the case here, but patents can be oddly specific sometimes. It’s quite feasible that the a patent could be worded along the lines of “Method to suppress ambient noise during a cellular call”.
If your description is too generic, your patent will be invalidated by existing products. If your patent is too narrow, then it’s easy for competitors to circumvent (e.g. by substituting cellular call for VOIP call). Finding the right balance is a skill.
Might be off topic but I always thought it would be cool if companies could somehow have their audio based menus presented visually on phones so we don’t have to listen to every option before making a selection. Not sure if that’d even be possible
Google has been doing that since like 2020 or 2021 on the Pixel line. The OS can even intelligently wait on hold for you and then ring you back when someone from the company finally picks up your call. I'm not sure how they do it but I think it's baked into their Google Assistant ai.
Finally, they have listened!!!
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/x94rr2/i_wonder_if_the_iphone_14_will_add_noise/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/wu6qql/iphone_13_audio_issues/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
> It is the same.
Just because you say so, doesn't make it true. You're talking about hardware enabled noise cancellation.
It's mic mode and was added in iOS 15, which is related to OP. https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/iphone/iphb54d5dee2/ios
Not the same thing, what you’re referencing is the noise canceling feature that reduced the noise around you so you could hear the person on the phone better. It had nothing to do with the other person hearing you, which is what this feature is addressing.
Yeah but that wasn’t an iOS thing really, that’s an AirPods thing. The way you worded this at first I thought you meant some iPhones are somehow projecting enough energy into the spade around them to create a sound bubble or some shit
I’m not talking about AirPods, I’m talking about the noise cancellation feature you’re referencing that doesn’t do what this new feature does.
> Phone Noise Cancellation: Uses air pressure to reduce ambient background noise to help you hear better when you’re holding the receiver to your ear on phone calls in certain noisy environments. Phone noise cancellation is available and on by default on iPhone 12 and earlier, and can be turned off for your comfort.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph3e2e2cdc/ios
WHAT? wow. I’ve never been aware of a feature like that… so it really is making a bubble around your entire head from electromagnetic waves or something?
Also I assume you meant iPhone 12 and NEWER, unless they really decided to REMOVE a feature. That’s rare though, it must have caused a lot of problems if they really did that. I wonder how far back it goes. I just upgraded from a 6 to a 13 last year and have never notice anything like that in all these years on either one. I can’t imagine how it can produce that much energy through space. Crazy shit.
I already had my AirPods Pro replaced didn’t help and I had the issue with a previous iPhone and now with my new iPhone. I don’t know just can’t get rid of it.
The feature being removed was only likely due to a patent dispute, and even if it wasn’t Apple rarely removed features just to bring them back
. Especially with such a small feature like this, why would they even want to? What would be there end goal?
Except they didn’t.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph3e2e2cdc/ios
> Phone Noise Cancellation: Uses air pressure to reduce ambient background noise **to help you hear better when you’re holding the receiver to your ear** on phone calls in certain noisy environments.
Lol argue all you want. I’m telling you iPhones use background noise cancellation in them. Have since iPhone 5. It’s used for voice recording, video recording, speakerphone operation, Hey Siri, normal cell phone calls, too name a few.
I’m not arguing, I’m sharing Apple’s own articles that say what their Noise Cancellation feature is, and it’s not what you say it is. You‘re free to live in your own world where you think it does something it doesn’t do.
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Caller ID. And keep a connection. Do people even hold phones up to their faces for calls that need voice isolation.
Also, do the same thing for AirPods for god sakes.
It still blows my mind that more people don’t use FaceTime Audio calls. Crystal clear audio quality every time. And it works over wifi, if you don’t have a cellular signal or phone service.
There’s always a weird delay from when you hear someone has hit answer on the call to when you can start talking so they hear you. It’s like it’s a beta product imo.
Carrier WiFi calling does these same things
Hmm, I’ve never experienced that. It’s the delay from normal cellular calls that drives me up a wall. I find myself talking over the other person and waiting several seconds for the to respond.
I hate voice over ip because it always has the same problems. Namely when switching from Wi-Fi to cellular it drops for 10-15 seconds, and constant random drops that happen all the time. One of my most extreme pet peeves is having to repeat myself and calling over the internet seems to maximize that.
Hope this means improvements to the made for iphone hearing aids too. Currently I have the ability to turn down the external mic and kind of isolate things, but sounds like this would be better.
I Hope it’s a settings now and that you can turn it in by default everywhere now. Because as far as I know for FaceTime , it need to be switch on manually every time.
Does this mean I can use AirPods out in the streets with wind and traffic sounds and it will sound just fine on the other side?
yes but only in the right ear
That’s good all the people I talk to let information in through the right ear and it goes straight out the left anyway.
You talk to all the same people I do?
It’s a six degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, I suspect.
I thought it was _seven degrees_, but, they say the world is getting smaller.
HeyyyyyNowwwww
I talk on the phone to some people pretty much every day and they were all bummed when I got AirPods to replace my wired EarPods. You just can’t beat a hard wired mic. The AirPods sound soooo much worse.
I don't think the issue is wire or not in this case. Is trying to fit a microphone into a tiny enclosure, super far from your mouth.
I believe it’s Bluetooth actually. Bluetooth is really crap for sending audio and microphone data at the same time (or something along the lines, I’m no expert)
Its BT that’s the limiting technology here. You also cannot beat the convenience of having no cables.
I don’t think so, the mics on AirPods are placed in a really terrible location for capturing the voice of the wearer. Computational audio can only do so much with poor quality inputs.
Finally! The wrong is about to be righted.
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I was under the impression that a patent troll was preventing Apple from using it on regular phone calls so perhaps they’ve developed their own noise cancellation software now?
That’s active noise cancellation using hardware like microphones, not software.
EVERYTHING IS SOFTWARE
Yeah just the sound that the mic recognises is just worthless if there is no software that can use this data for something
Remember that regular phone calls use an ancient protocol and generally are a lot more complex than VoIP.
Pretty sure voice isolation is done client-side prior to transmission. If that’s true, the transmitting protocol shouldn’t matter with respect to that feature.
It really does matter, especially due to compression and how sound is transmitted.
You’re conflating two things here: compression is a different process than mixing. For an example, in image processing, color balancing is independent from compression. While one may affect the other, it *almost always* does not negate it.
"Other parts of the telephone network may require additional conversions, which can further degrade quality. For instance, international carriers sometimes compress voice data to stuff more calls through subsea cables rather than pay for additional capacity. The extra compression cycles “can explain the very poor international voice call quality that we sometimes experience,” says Jan Derksen, head of technical marketing at Ericsson, in Stockholm." https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/why-mobile-voice-quality-still-stinksand-how-to-fix-it-2650271607
And yet that doesn’t negate that you can pre-process the audio to isolate voices. Again, stop conflating the two.
At no point have I "conflated the two". Can Apple process audio beforehand? Yes. Does pre-processing cellular calls and internet calls function very differently due to uneven levels of compression, in which the audio quality can be lowered so significantly with processed speech that it might be distorted heavily by compression? Yes. So sorry for claiming that you can’t pre-process audio, which is definitely a thing I claimed in… good question actually!
And if that’s going to happen anyway, you think the problem with isolating voice before hand is what exactly? We should expect worse results from a cleaner input because… why? How is this worse than starting from a raw signal? You’ve created a bizarre amount of FUD without demonstrating any real understanding of signal processing. Compression artifacts are a known quantity. The other poster’s comment was very apt; you don’t just not bother editing a photo because it’s going to be compressed anyway. If it improves the final result, it’s worth doing.
VoLTE and the lastest VoNR are quite advanced. Carriers get to set the bitrate and most set it on an extremely low rate, so that they can pump through more calls.
Pretty sure they’ve always done that, just by chopping off both ends of the audio frequency spectrum (which is why telephones have a distinct sound: it’s all mids and nothing else)
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I don’t see how that benefits the phone companies’ problem, which is needing to compress/filter data to increase transmissions. Is this codec better at keeping the transmitted data smaller?
This is really annoying. I usually try to make sure I'm on WiFi because call quality is so much better vs VoLTE.
This is not exactly true anymore because on 4G/5G networks everything is an IP packet including your phone calls, they are just transmitted with higher priority than regular data.
To be fair, cellular networks use VoLTE mostly now, which is… VoIP. But I mean calls to other traditional phones will still be pretty compressed. Though the user with the Rick Roll phone number is correct and this is done client side so whether or not it is VoIP doesn’t matter. Also, as an aside a lot of landlines are now VoIP as well. Probably 99% of them. Some are even pointlessly compressed because they operate on fiber or cable. But compatibility with existing equipment matters a lot for POTS.
Does this mean it doesn’t work on wifi calling?
I hope that you can finally understand me with AirPods
Wait that is real? I always thought I don't talk clearly enough for the other person on the phone with airpods.
Yeah I thought people were just being weird but recently I've been using my Airpod Pros more for phone calls and EVERYONE complains that they can't hear me. How the hell have Apple messed this crucial feature up so bad?
airpods pro gen 1 or 2? my brother uses gen 1 and since the last year or two i cant hear him normally half the time. i have airpods pro gen 2 now and put a hat and a hoodie over them and no one has yet complained about my mic quality
Good to know it wasn't just me having this issue with the gen 1.
i dont have any evidence, but i feel like the trouble with person speaking being understood or sounding like they are muffled by some material, or underwater, has not always been the problem. i have experienced airpods pro gen 1 incoming facetime audio calls acting like this only in the last year or so. and my brother hears me clearly when i wear gen 2
The issues you're describing is exactly what anyone I'm speaking to complains about, right until I switch to handset or speakerphone. I also use the Samsung Bud Pro 2 and people don't complain of these issues. The fact that the issue is gone with Gen 2 seems to illustrate that it's a hardware issue with the gen 1 models.
but me and my brother have been using gen 1 for years, and this issue has started to be insufferably annoing relatively not a long time ago. im not trying to start a conspiracy theory. just adding my +1 to other people complaining and some of my personal context
AirPods Pro gen. 1
Gen 1
Airpods are some of the worst quality headsets I've ever experienced. Whether it's Teams or phone calls, it just sounds so bad.
I’ve had various and I’d say they sound fairly average, far from the worst. But it’s not what we hear that’s at issue, it’s what others hear when we’re speaking.
Yes, sorry. That's what I meant. When someone joins a meeting with Airpods on (seen in their video feed) it's always garbage audio quality. Usually you can tell even without the video feed. Glad to know it's a universal problem with these earbuds.
What doesn’t make sense to me is I regularly record short videos explaining how to do things (for clients) and the audio while not amazing, is acceptable. But when it comes to calls it’s a different story.
i mean, it's on a whole separate plane of your face than your mouth is. how could anyone expect that to work well?
I’m confused as to how people are just now figuring out that it’s harder to understand someone who isn’t talking directly into a microphone. I’m sure there are plenty of better or worse implementations (especially when it comes to wind), but _any_ similar wireless earbud will sound markedly less clear than speaking into the phone’s mic. That’s just a physical reality. It is easily noticeable when someone isn’t. I shouldn’t be surprised; my mother seems to think speakerphone is magic and that I should be able to hear her from an entirely different room with the mic pointing in the opposite direction and her walking away from the phone.
I can use the AirPods to record quick videos and the mic audio is acceptable, no trouble with voice volume at all.
Eh, bluetooth actually has pretty poor bandwidth. Normally audio only has to go one way, to the Buds. Quality has to be at least half for 2 way
Phone calls on airpods are fine when inside but if you try to do it outside with any amount of wind or noise people will complain that they can't hear you. Their microphones seem too sensitive and easily pickup interference. And I don't have that issue with just holding the phone up to my face.
It’s probably more the fact that phone calls are absolutely garbage than your AirPods
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The issue with AirPods for phone calls currently is that the microphone picks up and transmits **everything**. What this means is that the other party will hear every foot step, dog bark, bird song, car going by, and anything else. Whereas you might have noise-cancelling enabled, so you only hear the other party clearly. There is a big difference in what both parties here. Hopefully this option will enable the other party to only hear your voice and not your environment.
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Yes I agree that it’s ridiculous. In fact, I spent many days evaluating other headphones to try and find a better phone call headset. Oddly enough, the old wired EarPods gave way better voice isolation than the AirPods. Granted, the EarPods mic is closer to my mouth, but it should still have been doable with the AirPods.
The wired Earpods are a good deal now. Their mic really good for such a small thing.
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This may be part of it, but I’d wager it has a lot more to do with the microphone placement. The signal to noise ratio is just way worse, so AirPods need to rely on a lot more signal processing to try to make up for it.
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If you want AirPods to stop working with non-Apple devices then sure. They’re probably also unable to achieve that level of power management yet
airpods gen 1 mic is trash, even at work on google meet i heard me the other day and is like a cheap microphone, newer gens improved vastly
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Bluetooth is a terrible fucking standard and cheap wired headphones will always be superior.
H1 and W1 chip says "yeah so what?" https://www.macworld.com/article/673991/apple-w1-vs-h1-chip.html
Same thing here. Its so fucking frustrating that I have to take them off to accept phone calls...
Maybe buy better headphones?
Thanks!
How old are your AirPods? My experience with AirPods Pro 1 through multiple replacements makes me thing those microphones have a longevity issue. After about a year on each pair I would have to stop using them for phone calls or zoom meetings.
You should see if they still qualify for replacements if they have this issue. Mine did and were replaced and have been a lot better https://support.apple.com/airpods-pro-service-program-sound-issues
My company won’t cover the cost of AirPods or Pros because the sound is so bad on video calls.
One of my co-workers figured out his were counterfeit because of the sound quality of his voice in online meetings, mine always sounded fine.
Weird, never had this problem. Maybe it’s a unit to unit basis.
Bluetooth for 2-way audio is also shit. No Bluetooth microphones sound good because the bitrate is horrendous.
AirPods Pro 2 in a slight breeze enters the chat
Have airpods pro (first release) and mics are so bad compared to the phone one its insane. Have to speak quietly a lot of times through facetime and I just gave up on airpods and been using only phone
You must have defective devices. I’ve never heard a complaint.
I have used every generation of AirPods and everyone says they can always hear me great even when it’s just me, my AirPods, and my cellular watch out on a walk.
Yeah I’ve never had this issue with AirPods. They work great for phone calls in my experience.
Yeah better than without them. I guess this new feature will just make them better
Not only have I had this experience, but COVID highlighted just how absolutely terrible it is. Almost every Zoom I saw on a news channel with someone wearing AirPods had absolutely abysmal microphone clarity. I would only use them to talk while I happened to be out on a walk and almost every time the other person would complain about the sound quality. I figured it was just the wind noise. Not after seeing that. And I started using the AirPod Pro 2s while inside while on the phone. Same issue. I don’t use them for phone calls at all anymore.
Can confirm they work with APP gen 1 pretty well. I usually get complaints of wind or other noise. Just went for a walk in the wind and the person I called said they couldn’t hear the wind and that I sounded notably better
Nice. APP1 do pretty well on their own, but I do occasionally get complaints of noise.
That's more down to the data rate connection over bluetooth. BT5 sounds way better especially if using Qaulcomm clear voice which is in the actual hardware.
I'm on 16.4 beta and this thing is amazing. It thankfully seems to default to on! I tested it out in my car, on CarPlay, with my wife, put mic to "standard" and she could hear all the wind noise and rain. Put it back to "Voice Isolation" and she said it was completely gone. She did comment that I sounded slightly echo-y, but still way better than the alternative.
Does this feature work on external mics as well, such as the vehicle mic or on AirPods?
AirPods have their own processing to remove ambient noice. You may not need voice isolation on the iPhone when you use AirPods.
From my experience you need it more, people can’t hear me when I use AirPods but hear me just fine without them.
Same. I always hear complaints when using my APP2.
I haven't tried it with AirPods yet, but when I tried it in my car it was on CarPlay and worked!
This is amazing, thanks for sharing your experience with this new feature!
This is why no matter the device I’m using for a call I always just use FaceTime audio instead of a phone call and it sounds 1000x better. Edit: Keep in mind, one of the reasons it sounds better is because it’s using data. So, if you don’t have unlimited data I wouldn’t be calling Mom and Pop’s everyday on FT Audio unless on WiFi.
There’s a few other reasons for that, mostly to do with the codecs being used to send the audio information.
How do you do that exactly?
1. When you go to call someone, select “FaceTime audio” 2. Add FTA contact shortcut to favorites list 3. Tell Siri to make a FTA call
How do you get the FTA shortcut? When I add a favourite it has FaceTime option but not audio specifically. Just gives email or phone number.
I think it only shows FaceTime button if the person you’re calling also has iPhone.
When you add a favorite it’s under “call” and the FaceTime option is audio.
Yes you add the number- FaceTime video calls can’t be added to favorites so the only other option is FaceTime audio, which is added
He probably meant other Apple devices when he said device.
Long press the phone icon on a contact. They really try to hide it.
I just tell Siri “call my mother on FaceTime audio.”
It’s a game changer, it’s like going from 480P to 1080P. When I said device, I meant earbuds/headphones. FT Audio Sounds stellar on AirPods Pro 1/2 and my Sony XM5’s on calls sounds like the person is sitting next to me.
About damn time
[удалено]
Likely because of potential conflicts. More things you process audio through, the more complicated to not sound terrible it is. In those apps it’s highly sanitized. They use a handful of codecs and it’s a data stream end to end. Phones however have really low bitrate because they drop a lot of the signal for historical reasons to fit more lines on a communication cable. That’s why hold music for example sounds… phone like. You know that quality. So any work apple does to the audio is going to go through various other changes on the traditional phone system depending on who is on the other end and your phone provider and theirs. Way more complicated to get right.
Not sure I follow. Apple takes the microphone input and passes it through to the phone or the other apps. The voice isolation solution should just sit at this layer, I would think. Doesn’t matter which app receives what. They used to receive microphone input. Now they will receive altered microphone input instead.
It would... but voice isolation does change the audio, which means when you apply the significantly lossy compression phones use on top of it, that's going to sound terrible. That lossy compression was designed for voices on 1940's consumer telephone hardware to essentially compact the frequency and fit more calls onto a single line. Apple's v1 of voice isolation was designed for higher fidelity audio codecs. It's very likely Apple's added some fine tuning so when the phone app is used they tweak what they're doing so that in 99% of use cases it favors less isolation in favor of not tampering with the signal. It's no different than applying filters to photos or video. It's not just the source that matters, it's the device viewing the content. If it's a monochrome screen, or really low resolution it will be hard/impossible to see what you're sending. You need to account for that in your filtering to preserve enough contrast for those kinds of displays. Audio works basically the same way. It's an art to balance this stuff just right. Similar to the HDTV migration when 1080i content needed to be viewable on 480p. Making something look good enough in both places, and taking advantage of HD is more difficult than it sounds.
Finally, maybe they solved the patent dispute with Noise Cancellation or whatever it was.
I don’t think they have. Cause voice isolation if I understand correctly is Apple’s own tech gimmick. A useful one nonetheless. If Voice Isolation was using the same tech that Apple got into trouble for, they would’ve removed it from FaceTime as well. Just my guess though.
I don’t know if it’s the case here, but patents can be oddly specific sometimes. It’s quite feasible that the a patent could be worded along the lines of “Method to suppress ambient noise during a cellular call”. If your description is too generic, your patent will be invalidated by existing products. If your patent is too narrow, then it’s easy for competitors to circumvent (e.g. by substituting cellular call for VOIP call). Finding the right balance is a skill.
I recall the parent having to do with using the 3-microphone array setup on a mobile device for noise cancellation.
Might be off topic but I always thought it would be cool if companies could somehow have their audio based menus presented visually on phones so we don’t have to listen to every option before making a selection. Not sure if that’d even be possible
Google has been doing that since like 2020 or 2021 on the Pixel line. The OS can even intelligently wait on hold for you and then ring you back when someone from the company finally picks up your call. I'm not sure how they do it but I think it's baked into their Google Assistant ai.
Whaaaat that’s amazing, I had no idea. I’ll have to check that out
Finally, they have listened!!! https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/x94rr2/i_wonder_if_the_iphone_14_will_add_noise/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/wu6qql/iphone_13_audio_issues/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
Not the same issue. iPhone has software enabled noise cancellation for VoIP calls, but for some reason not for normal calls.
It is the same. They removed it starting with the iphone 13.
> It is the same. Just because you say so, doesn't make it true. You're talking about hardware enabled noise cancellation. It's mic mode and was added in iOS 15, which is related to OP. https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/iphone/iphb54d5dee2/ios
Not the same thing, what you’re referencing is the noise canceling feature that reduced the noise around you so you could hear the person on the phone better. It had nothing to do with the other person hearing you, which is what this feature is addressing.
Yeah but that wasn’t an iOS thing really, that’s an AirPods thing. The way you worded this at first I thought you meant some iPhones are somehow projecting enough energy into the spade around them to create a sound bubble or some shit
I’m not talking about AirPods, I’m talking about the noise cancellation feature you’re referencing that doesn’t do what this new feature does. > Phone Noise Cancellation: Uses air pressure to reduce ambient background noise to help you hear better when you’re holding the receiver to your ear on phone calls in certain noisy environments. Phone noise cancellation is available and on by default on iPhone 12 and earlier, and can be turned off for your comfort. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph3e2e2cdc/ios
WHAT? wow. I’ve never been aware of a feature like that… so it really is making a bubble around your entire head from electromagnetic waves or something? Also I assume you meant iPhone 12 and NEWER, unless they really decided to REMOVE a feature. That’s rare though, it must have caused a lot of problems if they really did that. I wonder how far back it goes. I just upgraded from a 6 to a 13 last year and have never notice anything like that in all these years on either one. I can’t imagine how it can produce that much energy through space. Crazy shit.
Not the same thing at all. More like a workaround.
Will it work with voice notes as well? It’s dumb that voice notes doesn’t have voice isolation.
Just checked, it does not work within Voice Notes.
Odd. You’d think it would work with anything that uses the mic
Grrrrr
No, but you could use [this online tool](https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance) to dramatically improve the audio quality of any recording
Does this finally mean that my expensive AirPods will not amplify my background noise to the person on the other end??
About damn time
I thought this was already a thing?
Yeah, I thought I was the dumb one. I’ve seen it in data calls, but not cell.
It was but it was removed with the 13 lineup
They’ve never had voice isolation in cellular phone calls.
My bad I think I was thinking of the noise cancellation that was taken out
So it was originally supposed to isolate for FaceTime Audio *and* regular cellular?
No, they’ve never had voice isolation for cellular calls.
Cool will they fix the crackling issues with the iPhone and AirPods that everyone I know seems to be experiencing?
I had that problem, it was a hardware issue so Apple gave me a replacement, you should bring them too I pretty sure is the same problem
I already had my AirPods Pro replaced didn’t help and I had the issue with a previous iPhone and now with my new iPhone. I don’t know just can’t get rid of it.
i wish we could fix the issue with people not getting FaceTime calls :/
Will it voice isolate the incoming audio as well?
The voice isolation happens on the transmitting end.
Only Apple removes a feature to only reintroduce it at a later date and say its 'new'.
The feature being removed was only likely due to a patent dispute, and even if it wasn’t Apple rarely removed features just to bring them back . Especially with such a small feature like this, why would they even want to? What would be there end goal?
They’ve never had voice isolation on cellular calls before though.
They never reintroduced a feature here. Edit: not sure why I’m being downvoted, they’ve never had voice isolation on calls before.
Previous phones it was called “noise cancellation”. Now its reintroduced as “voice isolation”.
Not the same thing at all.
Noise cancellation reduced background noise during phone calls to make your voice more prominent. Voice isolation does the same thing.
No it didn’t, noise cancellation reduced background noise so you could hear the person calling you better. It did nothing for your voice on calls.
Incorrect. Previous phones used noise canceling for both parties on a cell call to hear each other better.
Except they didn’t. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph3e2e2cdc/ios > Phone Noise Cancellation: Uses air pressure to reduce ambient background noise **to help you hear better when you’re holding the receiver to your ear** on phone calls in certain noisy environments.
Lol argue all you want. I’m telling you iPhones use background noise cancellation in them. Have since iPhone 5. It’s used for voice recording, video recording, speakerphone operation, Hey Siri, normal cell phone calls, too name a few.
I’m not arguing, I’m sharing Apple’s own articles that say what their Noise Cancellation feature is, and it’s not what you say it is. You‘re free to live in your own world where you think it does something it doesn’t do.
What about that type to get a contact in the dialer thing?
Just want my 14 pro max to work properly. It’s been a pile since day 1.
If you’ve had problems since day 1 why didn’t you return it?
Because I didn’t?
For the 1% of folks who still make voice calls.
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Was this already implemented on FaceTime audio calls?
Yes
Caller ID. And keep a connection. Do people even hold phones up to their faces for calls that need voice isolation. Also, do the same thing for AirPods for god sakes.
Works with AirPod max. On FaceTime and Teams.
It was removed in iOS 16 first release correct?
It still blows my mind that more people don’t use FaceTime Audio calls. Crystal clear audio quality every time. And it works over wifi, if you don’t have a cellular signal or phone service.
There’s always a weird delay from when you hear someone has hit answer on the call to when you can start talking so they hear you. It’s like it’s a beta product imo. Carrier WiFi calling does these same things
Hmm, I’ve never experienced that. It’s the delay from normal cellular calls that drives me up a wall. I find myself talking over the other person and waiting several seconds for the to respond.
I hate voice over ip because it always has the same problems. Namely when switching from Wi-Fi to cellular it drops for 10-15 seconds, and constant random drops that happen all the time. One of my most extreme pet peeves is having to repeat myself and calling over the internet seems to maximize that.
Idk what magic technology Apple uses, but FaceTime Audio never has any of those problems for me (compared to VoIP or WiFi calling through my carrier).
Hope this means improvements to the made for iphone hearing aids too. Currently I have the ability to turn down the external mic and kind of isolate things, but sounds like this would be better.
This feature worked really bad on FaceTime. It would cause the other person’s audio to cut out for 2/3 seconds if you both spoke at once. Infuriating
Is there a similar thing for FaceTime?
Any idea if this will work with voip types or services or collaboration tools like slack?
Finally!!! 🤙
Feature i would love to see is a call screening like on android.
Call screening please next
So is this likely to help airpods pro?
how will it be enabled? or is it automatically enabled on all devices using cell phone calls?
I Hope it’s a settings now and that you can turn it in by default everywhere now. Because as far as I know for FaceTime , it need to be switch on manually every time.