To capture that diversity, we trained our model with data from more than 3,000 real room environments and more than 115,000 synthetically created rooms. The characteristics of the environment from which our users join a Skype meeting has a strong impact on the speech signal as well. We also included emotions in our clean speech so that expressions like laughter or crying will not be suppressed. For noise data, we included 150 noise types to cover the diverse scenarios our users may run into from keyboard typing, to running water, to snoring, and more.
We also collected data from 10+ languages, including tonal languages, to help ensure the model does not change the meaning of a sentence by distorting the tone of the words. For clean speech we used a balance of female and male speech. Instead, we used either publicly available data or crowdsourcing to collect specific scenarios. To comply with Microsoft’s strict privacy standards, no customer data was collected for this dataset. To achieve this diversity, the dataset we use contains approximately 760 hours of clean speech data and 180 hours of noise data. There needs to be enough diversity in the dataset in terms of the clean speech, noise types, and the environments from which our users are joining online calls. A representative dataset is used to train the ML model to work in most of the situations our Skype users experience. This technology relies on machine learning (ML) to learn the difference between clean speech and noise and is frequently referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). While traditional noise suppression algorithms can address simple, consistent noises like that of a fan, these neural networks can learn the difference between speech and more complex, inconsistent noises such as typing on a keyboard, the crunch of a food wrapper, and, yes, that howling dog. The Technology Behind the Featureįor those who want to understand the tech behind the feature: it works by analysing your audio feed and then using specially trained deep neural networks to filter out the noise without affecting the speaker’s voice. To activate this handy new feature in your Skype desktop app, see this article in our support section. To see it in action, check out the video below. * Originally developed for Microsoft Teams, this new feature is designed to silence just about everything except for your voice when you’re meeting on Skype. We are pleased to announce the release of our latest background noise suppression feature in the Skype desktop app. Whether it’s people talking, kids playing, the construction workers next door, or your pet dog scaring that imaginary monster away from the front porch, background noise can be really distracting when you’re trying to talk on Skype. Skype’s new noise suppression feature can knock it out! Noisy distractions aren’t much fun when you’re on a video call.