Google Meet takes on Zoom with AI-powered noise cancellation

After years of wheel-spinning, Google is frantically trying to compete in the video messaging space, where the coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion in demand for video conferencing. Meet's latest feature is noise cancellation for video conferencing, which can cut out a lot of the annoying background noises you would normally encounter in video calls.

The feature was originally announced in April, but it is only starting to roll out now and could take another month to hit everyone's account. Serge Lachapelle, G Suite's director of product management, gave an interview to VentureBeat explaining how the new feature works.

"It is important to say that this project stands on the shoulders of giants," Lachapelle told VentureBeat. "Speech recognition and enhancement has been heavily invested in at Google over the years, and much of this work has been reused." Once you have AI that can detect speech, apparently you can also use that tech to detect things that are not speech and remove them from the audio.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments