Now that we’re all working from home and dealing with the unfortunate realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, the total number and frequency of audio/video conferences has skyrocketed. Zoom and WebEx meetings are daily occurrences for many of us now, and if there is one thing that’s universally loathed during one of these conferences, it’s background noise. Whether it be someone typing away on a clicky keyboard, or someone’s kids, pets, or television constantly droning on in the background, interfering with the speaker, background noise just plain stinks.
Minimizing or eliminating background noise on your out-bound stream AND the in-bound audio stream from the conference is now possible using AI, however, thanks to NVIDIA
NVIDIA has just released a plug-in for many popular conference tools that leverages its latest GeForce RTX GPUs and AI to eliminate unwanted background noise. The tool is called RTX Voice, and it works with virtually all of the most popular live streaming, gaming, and video conferencing solutions in use today, from Discord and Twitch Studio, to Skype, Zoom, and WebEx (in addition to many others).
RTX Voice is designed to work with NVIDIA’s Turing-based GeForce RTX graphics cards, though there is currently a workaround available on-line to enable the technology on previous-gen Pascal-based cards, and a few Maxwell-based products as well. As its name implies, however, GeForce RTX cards are what NVIDIA is officially support at this point.
RTX Voice is currently in beta and available to download for free. HotHardware’s Ben Funk put the software to the set and found it to be quite effective – there is an audio sample available here that clearly demonstrates RTX Voice’s effect on the audio stream (it is best listened to with headphones). The software does place some load on the GPU, which can bring framerates in games down slightly, but not enough to have a perceptible impact.
Setting up RTX Voice is also relatively simple, but over and above installing it, there are a couple of hoops to jump though with your preferred conferencing / streaming / chat application. NVIDIA has that covered too, however, and have posted a lengthy article with detailed instructions for every application it supports.
You can find those instructions and a download link right here.
