How to enable the new MS Teams Noise suppression on macOS

Approximately one year after announcing that Microsoft Teams for Windows will get a noise suppression option, Microsoft now revealed that the same feature is going to be added to macOS as well.

The feature has been recently launched in public preview, meaning that it is available for testing for a limited number of users.

Having Noise suppression activated to a certain degree, the meeting presenter makes sure that the audience only hears music and the human voice. Other annoying background noises (pets, doors, alarms, shuffling papers, etc) are cancelled.

How to activate noise suppression on macOS?

1. Select your profile picture at the top right of the Teams app.
2. Then, select Settings.
3. Scroll down to Devices.
4. Under Noise suppression, select an option to determine how much of the background noise the app should mute.

These steps are avaialble if you’re making the changes before a meeting. If you want to adjust them during a meeting, the steps are the following:

1. From the meeting window, select More options in your meeting controls.
2. Then, choose Device settings.
3. Proceed with selecting an option under Noise suppression. The options are the same as in the previous instructions.

Presently, there are some limitations when it comes to totally shut off background noise – Noise suppression High, the announcement points out:

• Your computer’s processor must support Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2).
• Not available if the meeting or call is being recorded or live captions is turned on.
• This option uses more computer resources and the feature might fall back to Low automatically.

According to Microsoft, the preview app is not available on macOS devices with an M1 processor. Also, anyone who wants to join Microsoft’s public preview community can do so by switching a few settings.

The final Noise suppression option for macOS should be launched in August; until then, the feature is subject to changes.