While the iPhone has always done a relatively good job of filtering out basic background noise while you’re talking, Apple unlocked a new feature in iOS 16.4 that takes that to a whole new level thanks to the power of machine learning.
Traditional noise cancellation is handy for removing routine background noise, like the hum of traffic on city streets or your air conditioner, but it doesn’t do so well when it comes to less predictable sounds — like dogs barking, children playing, or babies crying. Filtering out those kinds of sounds is even more important these days as more and more people work from home, and — luckily — that’s exactly what Apple’s Voice Isolation feature is for.
Technically speaking, voice isolation first appeared in iOS 15, but that first iteration could only be used with FaceTime and other VoIP calls. The iOS 16.4 release extends this capability to mobile calls. If the people you’re talking to keep saying your voice sounds bad or muffled, using voice isolation should do the trick.
How to enable voice isolation during a phone call
Unfortunately, Apple didn’t make the Voice Isolation setting as obvious as it could have been; it’s so well hidden that many people may not even realize it’s there. The good news is that once you know where it is, you can enable it in just a second or two — and it’ll also stay on unless you turn it off again. Here’s how to find it.
Step 1: Open the Phone app and make a call. The voice isolation option will only appear when a call is in progress.
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Step 2: Swipe down from Upper right corner to open Control Center (or swipe up from the bottom if you’re using iPhone SE).
Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends
Step 3: You should see two new buttons for Video effects and Microphone mode at the top, above the usual control center panels for airplane mode and audio playback. choose Microphone mode.
Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends
Step 4: Choose Sound isolation from the pop-up dialog box that appears.
Step 5: Select an area outside the pop-up dialog box to close it and return to the main Control Center screen, then swipe up (or down on iPhone SE) to dismiss Control Center and continue your call.
Microphone mode will retain whatever settings were last used, so once you’ve enabled Voice Isolation, it should remain enabled for all future calls – both incoming and outgoing – unless you manually turn it off. However, Mic Mode is a global setting, meaning that changes made in other apps like FaceTime or Zoom can affect your mobile calls.
Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends
How to enable voice isolation on a FaceTime call
Enabling voice isolation on a FaceTime call is done the same way as for a mobile call, except you don’t need iOS 16.4; you can turn on voice isolation in FaceTime on any supported iPhone running iOS 15 or later.
As with the video background blur setting, you can also set Mic Mode as soon as you open the FaceTime app — no need to make an outgoing call first. The same applies to other video and VoIP applications such as Zoom and Skype. However, unlike the Video Effect setting, whatever Mic Mode you set will apply to all apps that support that mode.
For FaceTime and other VoIP applications, Apple offers another Wide spectrum a mode that does the opposite of voice isolation, increasing the microphone’s sensitivity so that callers can hear all the sounds around you. This is handy if you’re in a large conference room or attending a concert, but unfortunately it’s not yet available for mobile calls. Selecting broadband when using FaceTime will have no effect in the Phone app, which will use whatever other mode was set before switching to broadband.
Joe Maring / Digital trends
Which iPhone models support voice isolation
Because Voice Isolation uses advanced machine learning technology to analyze the sound from your microphone and separate your voice from the rest, it’s only available on models equipped with at least Apple’s A12 Bionic chip, the first to feature an octa-core Neural Engine designed for this kind of heavy lifting.
Fortunately, it’s still a pretty comprehensive list of iPhone models, starting with the iPhone XS and iPhone XR and covering the iPhone SE models released after that. This means that of all the iPhones that can run iOS 16.4, only the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are excluded.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn