A fan, traffic outside, an air conditioner or a noisy room can make a good recording hard to listen to. Modern AI noise removal can clean up a lot of it, but the best results come from combining good recording habits with the right clean-up afterwards.
Prevent noise when you record
- Get closer to the microphone. Halving the distance makes your voice much louder compared with the room, which is the single biggest improvement you can make. With a phone, hold it about a hand's width from your mouth.
- Turn off what you can. Fans, air conditioners, TVs and notifications.
- Choose a soft room. Curtains, carpets, beds and sofas absorb echo. A small room full of soft furnishings sounds far better than a big empty hall.
- Avoid wind. Outdoors, turn your back to the wind or use a foam windscreen.
- Record a few seconds of silence at the start. It helps you hear the background noise level before you begin.
Clean it up afterwards
The background noise remover uses RNNoise, an AI model trained to separate human voices from noise. It runs in your browser, so recordings stay private, and it works on audio files and on the sound of videos.
- Choose your recording or video.
- Click Remove noise, then compare the before and after.
- If the voice sounds thin or robotic, lower the strength to 70–80%: a little of the original sound keeps the voice natural.
- Turn on “Silence the gaps between words” for recordings with long pauses, such as lectures.
What it can and can't fix
| Works well | Hard to fix |
|---|---|
| Fans, air conditioning, hum and hiss | Other people talking at the same time |
| Traffic and street noise | Music playing in the background |
| Keyboard typing and clicks | Very strong echo in a large room |
| Wind and rain (moderate) | Distortion from recording too loudly |
Noise removal is made for speech. On music, it removes most of the music too. And if the voice itself is very quiet compared with the noise, some words may be lost, so recording closer is always better than fixing it later.
Next steps
Once the sound is clean, turn the speech into text with speech to text, or add captions to your video with Add Subtitles to Video. Both work better on clean audio.