Adding to the pile of features that lets Teams users have a fine conference call, Microsoft today announced three new features – echo cancellation, De-reverberation, and Interruptibility.
All of these are trained on specific AI models to smartly differentiate noises and speaker’s audio, and make the calls go fine. Aside from this, Microsoft also noted some previously launched features aiding for the same.
New Features in Microsoft Teams
Since COVID-19, Microsoft Teams grew to be one of the widely used video conferencing apps for schools, corporates, and other organizations. As it now has a significant userbase, Microsoft is rolling out new features regularly to offer fine experiences for users.
In this pursuit, we see the maker adding an echo cancellation support – where the disturbing sound caused due to a loop of sounds between input and output devices is addressed. With the help of AI, this feature can detect the difference between your voice and the speaker’s sounds, and eliminate the echo from your voice.
Further, there’s De-reverberation – a feature that addresses the acoustic sounds coming from your room – especially when you’re speaking from a distance. This makes your sound appear shallow and distorted. Thus, the De-reverberation feature will use ML to differentiate the room sounds and yours and let only your sounds pass through the device’s microphone.
At last, there’s Interruptibility – support that addresses the overlapping noise caused by two people speaking simultaneously. Though this can be addressed by speakers using a headset, most people don’t. Thus, the Interruptibility feature is kicked in to identify the two-way calls and make it clear for both.
For this, the technology was trained on 30,000 hours of speech samples to spot and filter out the undesired voices, so the audio from all the speakers is heard clearly, even if they’re overlapping.
