Qualcomm’s New Voice-Calling Tech Nukes the Noise

At Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit today, the company showed off a cool feature of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset that completely eliminates noise from the background of a phone or video call, without giving the call a compressed or computery sound.

Phone makers have worked on noise cancellation for decades now. It used to be a major part of my review process. Nowadays, phone makers primarily use multiple microphones on a device to figure out which audio is coming from the person holding the phone and which audio isn't, and then they cancel the audio that isn't.

Qualcomm's latest tech works on phones with just one microphone, although it won't work on inexpensive phones (yet) because it requires the company's new top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset. The effect is striking, as you can see in the video below.

The key is AI, says Shaun van Dyken, Qualcomm's senior director of engineering. The new chipset's AI engine knows what “speech” sounds like and can isolate it from other kinds of noise, even other chatter. The feature for now will run only on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset because it needs the new chipset's AI processor.

“The only issue you would see is if you're blasting huge, white noise,” Van Dyken says. “Microphone quality doesn't even matter that much.”

The tech could also be used in video-calling apps such as Google Meet or Zoom, and for recording or transcribing speakers on video. (Google's excellent transcription feature in its Pixel 6 phone uses a similar concept, running the sound through the phone's Tensor AI processor to isolate and analyze speech.)

Although phone makers are going to have to enable the feature, it won't require third-party software licensing and will be integrated into the phone calling path, he says.