Eliminating background noise on phone calls is vital for your business.
It can improve comprehension. Picture someone calling a car shop. All the work being done in the background — can anyone hear what you’re saying clearly?
Noisy calls produce a bad impression. Transmitting clear audio gives your business a professional appeal. It can be the difference between giving the feel of trustworthiness and making people think you represent a fly-by-night operation. We’re only human after all.
It can even be a privacy or security issue. We’ve all been on calls where you hear people talking in the background. True, it’s unlikely that someone would be talking about a trade secret while someone else is on the phone near them, but you still don’t want to be transmitting a conversation happening near you to a customer on the other end. If nothing else, it’s very distracting.
So, getting rid of background noise on phone calls — whether you’re using the phone’s handset or wearing a headset — is vital to business communications.
When it comes to reducing background noise, there are two types of solutions: environmental and technological.
In this blog, we discuss how to make a quieter space for you to work in. Then, we cover the wide variety of technological solutions that VoIP phone and headset manufacturers have developed to improve audio quality on calls.
Let’s get into it!
Creating a Quieter Working Space
When trying to reduce background noise on phone calls, the first thing to do is to consider your work environment.
What is causing noise where you work? Can you reduce noise by making changes to your workspace?
There are many sources of background noise, including people speaking, the HVAC system humming, paper rustling, keyboard typing, food eating, coughing, people walking, phones ringing, and more. These noises come in two types: sudden and constant. A door slamming is a sudden noise, while an air conditioner is a constant noise. How do you deal with all this noise?
The first step is to keep sources of noise away from phone calls. This step is useful for both sudden and constant noise.
If possible, isolation is the best solution. Close the door — it will never be beaten.
Position loud machines like photocopiers and coffee makers in separate spaces with doors or behind shielding barriers. Require people to eat away from their desks in a break room or cafeteria. Have dedicated conference rooms and use them even for impromptu meetings.
The second step is to reduce echoes. This step is particularly useful for counteracting sudden noise.
Echoes make sounds louder. They’re amplified by hard surfaces, because these surfaces reflect soundwaves rather than absorb them. If you’ve ever moved into an empty house or apartment with hardwood floors, you know how loud echoes can make a space.
If your workspace has hard surfaces like blank drywall, brick walls, glass walls, and so on, a good first step you can take to reduce noises on calls is to install soft surfaces.
Soft surfaces like carpets, rugs, curtains, paintings, plants, armchairs, partitions, and acoustic panels make spaces quieter by absorbing sounds. In fact, acoustic panels are often called sound absorbing panels or noise dampening panels.
These can make a big, big difference, even in open offices. It’s worth investing in them to improve the audio quality on business calls.
Even if you have an office with a door, sound might pass through the ventilation system or plenum. Sometimes the sound is so clear you can understand conversations. We wrote about sound masking speakers that emit white noise to cover sound travelling through ventilation systems and plenums. That said, a sound masking speaker might be an extreme solution when noise cancelling technologies are commonly available.
You can’t always remove all sources of noise. There are many situations in which it’s impossible to create a quiet environment: auto shops, grocery stores, factories, security kiosks, and on and on.
Open-plan offices are the worst offenders when it comes to background noise on phone calls. You simply can’t stop everyone from talking and typing and working just for your call.
With places like these, you need to rely on technology.
Thankfully, phone manufacturers have come to the rescue. There are many noise-reducing technologies for VoIP phones and headsets.
Noise Cancellation Technologies
How do VoIP phone handsets provide noise cancellation? How about headsets?
The first way they eliminate noise is passive noise cancellation (PNC).
Passive noise cancellation can apply both to cancelling noise you hear and to noise you transmit. When it comes to transmitting noise, PNC refers to using the audio stream picked up by directional microphones pointed straight at your mouth. These mics, by their construction and orientation, don’t pick up ambient sound. That’s why it’s “passive” noise cancellation: nothing else is needed for them to eliminate noise.
Note: Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) refers to cancelling noise you hear, not noise you transmit. That’s why we don’t cover it in this blog. If you’d like to know more about ANC, check out our blog, “Active Noise Cancellation vs Passive Noise Cancellation.”
Of course, PNC can only take you so far. Ambient noise will be picked up by a microphone. In fact, many handsets and headsets have microphones that aren’t pointed at your mouth. Why? They pick up ambient sounds so that they can eliminate them.
There are numerous well-established technologies for clarifying audio streams. You’ll see them in many a phone datasheet, probably as a list of letters:
- VAD (Voice Activity Detection). Detects the presence or absence of human speech.
- AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancellation) or AES (Acoustic Echo Suppression). Prevents echoes from being produced and/or transmitted.
- CNG (Comfort Noise Generation). Fills in the silence resulting from VAD and other noise suppressants.
- AJB (Automatic/Adaptive Jitter Buffer). Smooths the audio stream by dynamically producing a short buffer before transmitting voice data. There is also Fixed Jitter Buffer, which does the same thing but with a fixed length of buffer instead of a dynamic length.
- AGC (Automatic Gain Control). Maintains a good signal amplitude output despite varying levels of input.
And there are more!
These are long-standing solutions for clarifying audio streams on phone calls. Some of them go back to AM radio.
They are the fundamental technologies by which noise is handled. Companies have developed advanced algorithms that build on these fundamental technologies.
The new algorithms interpret audio streams to identify and eliminate noise more accurately than the traditional solutions. They are now improved with machine learning and AI, making them adaptive and intelligent. They’re better than ever.
One technology that’s frequently found is known variously as Acoustic Fence (Poly), Acoustic Shield (Yealink), and so on. It doesn’t have a standard name.
Whatever its name, the basic idea is the same. Microphones on the handset or headset pick up ambient sounds. Based on differing sound pressure levels, the device determines how far away a sound source is. It then eliminates any sounds that originate beyond a certain distance.
In other words, the device puts up virtual walls around you that block out background noise.
Another technology that clarifies the audio stream you’re transmitting also doesn’t have a standard name but is known variously as Noise Proof (Yealink), NoiseBlockAI (Poly), and so on.
You can think of it as the device automatically pressing the mute button for you. When you’re not speaking, mute is on; when you start speaking, mute is off. The algorithms are so good now that you won’t notice this happening. The effect is that you don’t transmit any noise when you’re not speaking, which is when people will hear the most noise typically.
These technologies also provide a range of background noise suppression while you’re speaking to get rid of typing, chatter, footsteps, and so on.
Headsets designed to be used on-the-go will often have noise suppression technology specifically for wind. Poly, for example, calls this WindSmart.
You might find phones and headsets that automatically adjust the quality of the audio stream to suit the environment. Yealink, for example, calls this Adaptive Audio Processing.
The idea is this: when you speak in a recording booth, you’ll sound quite different than when you speak in a hotel lobby. The device interprets the quality of the audio stream and intelligently reacts to the different qualities caused by different environments to provide an audio stream that sounds more natural, regardless of where you’re speaking.
In fact, just transmitting better audio quality improves noise levels by itself.
VoIP phones can transmit significantly more of the audio spectrum than a traditional landline phone. That’s because landline phones are built to only transit a narrow band of the spectrum. VoIP phones — whether you use a handset or headset — will typically support wideband or even fullband audio.
How does this help with noise levels? By reproducing a wider band of the audio spectrum, noises that are transmitted interfere less with your voice. Narrowband audio smashes all the sounds together, making it harder for your ears to separate voice from noise.
One final technology for eliminating noise is totally different: use a busylight. A busylight is a light that changes color to indicate your call status. If you’re on a call, it lights up red; if you’re available, green. This is a simple, efficient solution for letting people know when they need to be quieter around you and not disturb you.
Many headsets now come with busylights. There are also busylights available separately for certain VoIP phones.
Handsets vs Headsets
To finish, we wanted to answer a question you might have. Which is better for cancelling noise: a VoIP phone handset or a headset?
The answer is that both can be really good at eliminating noise. It really depends on the manufacturer and model.
That said, the typical headset will probably give you better sound quality than the typical VoIP phone handset. If nothing else, the microphone will be positioned better.
Some headsets use more microphones than handsets. For example, Jabra Evolve2 65 Flex has six microphones. Having more mics lets it fine-tune noise reduction. We’re not aware of any VoIP phone handsets that use this number of microphones, so that’s Advantage: Headsets.
Here’s a small tip to save you time: if your business uses Microsoft Teams for communications, look for headsets that meet the Microsoft Teams Open Office certification. These headsets are guaranteed to meet strict noise cancellation standards. Makes shopping easier!