Skip to main content
In real-world scenarios, phone calls often face audio quality challenges such as background noise, echo, or other unwanted sounds. We have a couple different features that are designed to help you handle these challenges.

​
Set denoising mode

  • No denoising: disables all audio preprocessing and passes the raw audio signal directly to the ASR model. The ASR model itself can handle a minimal level of ambient noise without preprocessing. Choose this mode if you experience issues with missing short responses (e.g. “sure”, “yes”) or degraded accuracy with non-English transcription, particularly when background noise is not significant.
  • Remove noise (default): removes background noise with nearly no distortion to the waveform, so it has no meaningful impact on speech-to-text accuracy. It will not remove loud background speech.
  • Remove noise + background speech: a more aggressive mode that removes both background noise and background speech. This may distort the waveform and can reduce speech-to-text accuracy in some cases. This option incurs a $0.005/min surcharge due to the additional processing required.
If your use case typically involves loud background speech — such as a TV or a construction site — try the Remove noise + background speech mode. For most use cases, Remove noise is the recommended default. If the environment is quiet and transcription completeness is the priority, use No denoising.

​
Tuning interruption sensitivity

The denoising mode setting is to combat background speech and noise before the transcription is generated. And even with those in place, there can still be cases of unwanted interruptions. You can configure the interruption sensitivity to reduce these cases. Set it lower if you want agent to be more resilient to background speech or user interruptions.
  1. In the same settings panel
  2. Set the “Interruption Sensitivity” to 0.8
  3. This setting helps the agent reduce false interruptions from background speech and noise
For extremely noisy environments, you may need to experiment with even higher settings. Note that this setting will hinder the ability of your agent getting interrupted, so it’s a trade off you need to make.

​
Remove noise from the user’s side

As the audio quality is determined by the user’s side, you can also try the following:
  • User side noise reduction: use better microphone & client side noise reduction libraries if using web calls
  • Prompt the agent to ask your users to speak louder so it can be distinguished from background speech easier