Which noise cancelling software for your mic actually works on calls?

Monday stand-up, eight people on Zoom. On Friday the neighbor started drilling, so you set Background noise suppression to High, and it worked: the drill vanished. Today there is no drill, yet a colleague asks you to repeat yourself twice, because the ends of your words keep getting clipped. The stand-up ends, you jump into a Slack huddle, and the person on the other side hears your fan for the first time. Same mic, same room, two different voices, because the noise cancelling software you set up lives inside one app and nowhere else.

That is the real question behind "which noise cancelling software actually works". Almost any noise cancelling software for your mic will remove noise. The options differ in where they sit between your mic and the person listening, and that position decides three things: which apps get the clean sound, what the processing does to your voice when there is no noise to remove, and whether you pay for it.

Three places noise cancelling software can sit

Every option on the market falls into one of three slots.

1. Inside the call app. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Discord each ship their own suppressor. It is free, already installed, and it only touches that one app.
2. Inside the operating system. macOS has Mic Modes with Voice Isolation, but the switch only appears in apps that support Mic Modes.
3. Between the mic and every app. A noise cancelling app that installs a virtual microphone. You pick that virtual mic in Zoom, Telegram or OBS, and each of them receives sound that has already been processed. Krisp works this way, and so does TunedMic.

One detour first. If the noise you are fighting is physical and constant, a fan a few feet away or a loud keyboard right next to the mic, software is not the cheapest fix. Mic distance and direction do more and cost nothing, and how to stop your mic picking up background noise is the page for that reader. If you have already decided you will not pay anything, the free noise cancelling options and where they stop goes deeper on what free tools can and cannot do. The rest of this article compares the three slots for people who spend a good part of the day on calls.

What the call apps already do for free

Before installing any noise suppression software, check what you already have. Every major call app processes your mic by default, and most people never look at the setting.

Zoom

Zoom's desktop app on Mac, Windows and Linux keeps a Background noise suppression dropdown under Settings, Audio, Microphone modes, Noise removal. Zoom's support page lists four levels:

• Auto, the default, applies moderate reduction and adjusts it to what it hears.
• Low blocks only quiet, steady noise. Zoom suggests it for casually playing music.
• Medium targets fans, pen tapping and similar desk noise.
• High is the most aggressive and can remove other people talking in the background. Zoom warns it may increase CPU use.

There is no Off in that list. To drop the processing you switch the microphone mode to Original sound for musicians, which Zoom describes for instruments and for higher-quality mics that already filter their own sound. There is also Personalized audio isolation, which builds a profile from your voice and is meant for crowded places.

Microsoft Teams

In the Teams desktop app the control is a single Noise suppression toggle, found under Settings and more, Settings, Devices, or during a meeting under More actions, Audio settings. Microsoft's help page suggests turning it off if you use a high-fidelity mic in a quiet room. The Auto, Low and High levels on the same page are for the iOS app.

Google Meet

Meet calls its version Noise cancellation: More options, Settings, Audio. The catch is the account. Google's help page lists it for certain Google Workspace editions (Business Standard and up, several Enterprise and Education editions), for Workspace Individual and for Google One subscribers with 2 TB or more. On a plain personal account the switch may not be there at all.

Discord

Discord builds Krisp in. Under User Settings, Voice & Video, Noise Suppression lets you pick Krisp, and inside Discord it costs nothing. On a Mac, Discord's FAQ says it needs an Apple processor and macOS 12 or later, and that it switches itself off when the CPU is very busy. The same FAQ contains a line most guides skip: in a quiet room with a good mic, you may notice your voice quality drop with Krisp on. The reason comes a little further down, and the full Discord picture is in how good Discord noise suppression is.

Why free in-app suppression is not the whole answer

These four are different engines with different defaults and different names for the same switch. Your voice on a Zoom call and your voice in a Discord channel pass through two unrelated algorithms. If one of them is set too hard, you sound worse there and nowhere else, and nobody tells you, because you never hear your own outgoing audio. For someone who lives in one app, the built-in setting is often all they need. For someone who moves between Zoom, Teams, Telegram and a browser call five times a day, it means five settings to keep straight and five ways to sound slightly different.

Noise suppression on Mac: Voice Isolation

The closest thing to built-in noise suppression on a Mac is Mic Mode. During a call in an app that supports it, click the video icon in the menu bar, then Mic Mode, and choose:

• Voice Isolation to filter out background sound,
• Wide Spectrum to keep the room in,
• Standard to go back to normal.

Apple's guide starts with "an app that supports Mic Modes, such as FaceTime" and notes that the options vary by app. That is the limit: the switch belongs to the app, and an app that has not adopted Mic Modes will not show it. When it is there, try it first. It is free and needs nothing installed.

Real time noise cancelling software that works in every app

The third slot is what most people mean when they search for a noise cancelling app for Mac or a background noise cancelling app for calls: a program that processes the mic once and offers the result to every app.

The mechanism is a virtual microphone. The app adds an extra audio input to your Mac. It reads your real mic, cleans the sound in real time and feeds the result into that virtual input. In Zoom, Meet, Telegram or OBS you choose the virtual mic instead of the physical one, and from then on all of them receive the same processed voice. If the idea is new to you, what a virtual microphone is walks through it.

Krisp

Krisp is the usual example of real time noise cancelling software built this way. Its help pages describe the setup as choosing Krisp Microphone (and, optionally, Krisp Speaker) in each app's audio settings. As of October 2026, Krisp's pricing page offers a 7-day free trial with unlimited noise cancellation, then paid plans from $16 per user per month, or from $8 per user per month billed annually. The paid plans also bundle an AI note-taker and accent conversion, so part of what you pay for is not noise at all. Whether the subscription makes sense for a Mac user is its own question, answered in is Krisp worth paying for on a Mac.

NVIDIA Broadcast

Often recommended, and of no use on a Mac. NVIDIA lists Windows 10 64-bit or Windows 11 and a GeForce RTX 2060, Quadro RTX 3000 or better as requirements. If you arrived here from a Windows guide, see what Mac users run instead of NVIDIA Broadcast.

The OBS noise suppression filter

OBS Studio has a free Noise Suppression filter with three methods: RNNoise (the default), Speex, and NVIDIA Noise Removal on supported NVIDIA hardware. It does its job, and it only cleans what OBS records and streams. Zoom still takes your raw mic. That makes it a streamer's tool rather than a call tool; which OBS mic filters to use covers it properly.

Noise removal is subtraction, and that is where voices get hurt

Every piece of noise cancellation software, from Zoom's dropdown to a paid background noise removal app, works the same way at heart: it guesses which part of the signal is voice and turns the rest down. When the guess is right, the dog disappears. When the guess is wrong, it takes a piece of you with it: the tail of a word, the breath before a sentence, the hiss of an "s" that lets the listener tell "six" from "fix".

Two situations make wrong guesses more frequent.

A quiet room with a decent mic. There is little noise to remove, so most of what the filter removes is voice. Discord's FAQ warns about exactly this, and Microsoft gives the same advice for Teams in different words.

Two suppressors in a row. A virtual mic cleans the sound, then Zoom on Auto cleans it again, and if the listener runs Krisp Speaker, their copy gets cleaned once more on the way in. Each stage sees only what the previous one left, and each takes its own bite. The fix is boring: one stage of noise removal, not three.

There is also a problem no noise suppression software touches. A lot of "my mic sounds bad" has nothing to do with noise. A MacBook's built-in mic that sounds thin and distant, a USB condenser catching the echo of a bare room, a headset that sounds boxy, a voice that is simply too quiet: removing background noise changes none of these. It can even make them more obvious, because the hiss that was masking the thinness is gone.

This matters beyond comfort. In a 2025 study in PNAS, Walter-Terrill and colleagues at Yale played listeners the same recording either clear or distorted. The words were equally easy to follow in both versions, yet hireability ratings fell from 76 to 68.5 out of 100 for the distorted one. People understand you either way. They judge you on how you sound.

Where TunedMic fits, and where it does not

TunedMic is a paid macOS app that sits in the third slot: it adds a virtual microphone of its own, and any app that lets you choose a mic can use it. The difference from a pure noise cancelling app is the job it was built for. Setup is a one-minute Sound Check: you read a short passage aloud, and the app takes more than 30 measurements of your voice, your mic and your room. From that it builds nine profiles in three families (Narrator for calls and lessons, Creator for streams and podcasts, Vocal for singing), each based on your own recording rather than a stock preset. Noise is one control among several, next to room echo, clarity, loudness and a 12-band equaliser, and you never have to touch any of them by hand.

In practice that gives you:

• one sound for Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, Telegram, Discord and OBS, with a profile switch applying to all of them at once;
• processing on the Mac itself, with your voice never uploaded;
• less than a tenth of a second of added delay, which disappears into the call's own delay;
• a voice shaped for your mic and your room, not only stripped of noise.

The limits are firm. It needs a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer) and macOS 14 or later; Intel Macs are not supported, and there is no Windows version. The first 3 days are free and nothing is held back; once you pay, there are no refunds. It costs $39 once at the launch price, with a year of updates and a license for two Macs. It will not remove every noise, and it will not turn a budget mic into a specific expensive one.

So it is the wrong pick if you are on Windows or an Intel Mac, or if you use one call app and your only problem is a barking dog: that app's built-in setting is free and may be all you need. It earns its place when the problem is how you sound everywhere, not only what is happening behind you.

Which one to use

A settings chain that does not fight itself

If you run any virtual mic, set up the chain so that only one stage removes noise. A starting point:

Real mic (USB, headset or MacBook built-in)
  -> one processor: Krisp Microphone or TunedMic
  -> call app, with its own noise removal at the lowest level

Zoom:     Background noise suppression = Low
          (there is no Off; Original sound for musicians is meant for instruments)
Teams:    Noise suppression toggle = off
Meet:     Noise cancellation = off (if your account shows it)
Discord:  Noise Suppression, Krisp = off
macOS:    Mic Mode = Standard

Low rather than Original sound in Zoom is deliberate. Original sound for musicians is meant for instruments and higher-quality mics, and its High-fidelity music mode disables echo cancellation, which you want left on whenever you are not wearing headphones. Low keeps Zoom's standard processing with the lightest noise reduction it offers.

If you do not run a virtual mic, reverse the logic: leave each app's suppression on its default and raise it only on noisy days.

Then check the result the way the other side hears it. You cannot judge your outgoing audio from inside a call; how to hear what others hear on a call shows how to record yourself and listen back.

Your next step

Record twenty seconds of yourself talking with your usual mic and your usual noise, the fan or the street, and listen back on headphones. If what bothers you is the noise behind you, turn on your call app's own suppression or Voice Isolation and record again. That may be the whole fix, and it costs nothing. If the noise is gone and your voice still sounds thin, far away or boxy, you have found the part noise cancelling software does not touch. Listen to the before and after recordings on the TunedMic home page, made with a MacBook's built-in mic, a cheap wired headset and a Hollyland Lark M2, including one Lark take with a Dyson hair dryer running about a meter (3 ft) away. If your Mac has Apple silicon and runs macOS 14 or later, the price and what it includes are on the pricing page.