Microsoft Teams now utilizes AI to enhance echo, interruptions, & acoustics

• Microsoft has spent the last two years enhancing Microsoft Teams.
• Corporation is now utilising machine learning models to enhance room acoustics.
• This means you won’t sound like you’re in a cave any more, thanks to AI-powered voice enhancement.

Microsoft has been testing this for months, putting its models to the test in the real world to make sure Teams users see the echo reduction and call quality improvements. 30,000 hours of speech were used to train the software’s algorithms, and thousands of devices were gathered using crowd sourcing, in which Teams users are paid to record their voice and replay audio from their smartphone.

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“We also simulate about 100,000 different rooms… the room acoustics play a big role in echo cancellation,” Aichner explains. As a consequence, call audio quality has improved significantly, and echo has been eliminated, allowing numerous people to speak at the same time. In the video above, you can see all of the changes in action.

If Teams detects sound bouncing or rebounding in a room, the model will convert and filter collected audio to make it appear like Teams players are speaking into a close-range microphone rather than an echoey mess.

The most striking feature is the ability for individuals on Teams conversations to interrupt each other without the uncomfortable overlap when you can’t hear the other person because to the echo. All of this work, as well as previous improvements to AI-based noise suppression, is now available in Microsoft Teams. Instead of using the cloud, all processing is done locally on client devices.

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Explains Aichner, “We said we want to do it on the client, because the cloud is still expensive if you want to do every call processed in the cloud… and obviously we’d have to pass that cost onto the customer.”

That would possibly limit these crucial Teams enhancements to paying customers, whereas the on-device method ensures that features like noise reduction are available on 90% of Teams-enabled devices.

All of these new Microsoft Teams features, as well as certain real-time screen optimizations for text in videos and AI-based bandwidth improvements during video or screen-sharing sessions, are now available.