Microsoft, aiming to further improve the quality of voice calls on Teams, has announced new AI-based features such as echo cancellation, room acoustics improvements and more. These come in addition to the latest background noise reduction feature for Teams. Take a look at the new Teams features.
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The echo cancellation feature will eliminate the echo effect that is usually created when a person has the microphone too close to the speaker. Using AI, Teams will be able to recognize the difference between audio from a speaker and the user's voice for echo cancellation. Microsoft says this feature will work without suppressing speech or interrupting multiple people speaking at the same time.
The "De-reverberation" feature also uses AI and is supposed to make the sound output clearer as if the person is "speaking into a microphone at close range." This is for situations where a person's voice may sound shallow due to poor room acoustics.
Another feature, which Microsoft calls "Interruptibility" will enable clearer communication in situations where two people are talking at the same time. That said, full-duplex (two-way) transmission of audio (the ability to speak and listen at the same time) can usually cause unwanted noise or echo, especially when a headset is not in use. Microsoft aims to sort out this problem with another AI model, which has been trained with 30,000 hours of speech samples to keep the conversation smooth.
