I think Discord is one of the best services around for hosting voice and video chats with your friends—not to mention the fact that it serves as a home for communities devoted to just about any geeky hobby you can think of. And conversing on the service is about to get a lot better—especially if your friends are always complaining that your mic sucks.
Discord is now testing out a noise suppression feature that promises to help reduce annoying background sounds during voice and video chats. The company stresses that this is a beta test, so if something sounds funky on your end or the suppression isn’t as strong as you were expecting it to be, additional tweaks are undoubtedly coming.
To get started with the beta, launch Discord and pull up your settings by clicking on the tiny gear icon next to your name in the lower-left corner of the window. From there, click on “Voice & Video” under App Settings:
Scroll down a bit, and you’ll see a new “Noise Suppression” setting under the “Advanced” section. Toggle it on.
That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Discord doesn’t detail the technology of how the service works—it’s powered by an integration with Krisp, not something Discord built natively—but the offered FAQ does note that the service won’t share anything you say with a third party.
“We do not pass any information or data to Krisp when you enable the tech on Discord. This means that no voice, user, video or any data is ever sent or shared outside of Discord. The machine learning model runs on your device to cancel out noise – no data is ever sent to Krisp’s servers under any circumstances.”
Phew.
Also, I recommend not leaving this feature on simply because it sounds like something you could benefit from: Discord’s FAQ also calls out the fact that it might actually lower the quality of your audio if you’re already using a solid microphone in a pretty quiet room. Noise suppression isn’t going to make something that’s already great sound better; it’s intended to help dull out background noise—of the annoying droning variety, not people talking — only when you need it to. If you don’t need it, don’t use it.
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