When you’re on an important conference call, you don’t want to distract your audience with the sounds of your house in the background. That’s why popular conferencing services like Zoom and Microsoft Teams make a smart feature that blocks much of that sound from making it through.
While Zoom supports this noise suppression feature on both Mac and Windows, Teams currently only employs this option on the latter. Microsoft has confirmed that the feature is currently in development for Mac, so it’s only a matter of time before we see it hit the platform.
Whichever service you use, you’ll see different settings to choose from — “Auto” will try to guess the sounds you want to keep and block sounds you don’t; “Low” blocks a minor amount of background noise, but keeps in things like background music; “Medium” (only available on Zoom) steps up the noise suppression a bit, but will still let in some noise; while “High” is more aggressive, attempting to tackle essentially all noise that isn’t you speaking.
If you want to give the options a try in Zoom, click the arrow next to the “Stop Video” button on your call, click “Video Settings,” choose “Audio,” then click “Low” next to “Suppress background noise.” Zoom’s default noise supression setting is Low.
For Teams, you’ll need to head to your Settings, then click “Devices.” Now, under Noise suppression, choose the option that works best for you. Teams’ default noise suppression setting is Auto.
