Hi Folks. Just curious if anyone knows the underlying reason why the Voice Isolation Mic Mode isn't an option during cellular phone calls and if it ever may become available. I am wondering if there are technical or licensing limitations. I called and asked Apple tech support, but they didn't have an answer.
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Why no Voice Isolation capability during cellular phone calls?
- Thread starter Mr. Glass
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The other day my father asked me about it and I had to tell him it isn’t available for regular cellular calling, only for FaceTime. It’s just Apple being Apple and getting away with it.
Kind of like why we don’t have a floating calculator yet. It would be incredibly helpful. But no, so long as people keep lapping up whatever they choose to sell, who’s gonna be motivated to innovate?
iOS has been pretty stagnant now usability-wise. Every year we just talk about camera improvements and speed. They’re happy doing it, people are happy buying it. Nobody cares. If someone were to speak, they’ll be told to go to Android. 🤣
Kind of like why we don’t have a floating calculator yet. It would be incredibly helpful. But no, so long as people keep lapping up whatever they choose to sell, who’s gonna be motivated to innovate?
iOS has been pretty stagnant now usability-wise. Every year we just talk about camera improvements and speed. They’re happy doing it, people are happy buying it. Nobody cares. If someone were to speak, they’ll be told to go to Android. 🤣
Likewise! Voice Isolation has been such a game-changer for me to cut out keyboard, mouse-clicking, and background noise during work calls on Teams and other VoIP platforms, but there are plenty of times when I need to do cellular voice and there's a large difference for people at the other end of the line.
The iPhone has had multi microphone background noise cancellation for phone calls since IIRC iPhone 4. This has been an industry standard for many, many years. FaceTime had no such configuration (not sure why), which is why background noise proliferated on FaceTime calls. The addition of voice isolation/microphone modes to FaceTime is actually FaceTime catching up in that regard, which I am excited for!
Yes, this has been the case for cellular voice calls if you're using the mic of the handset, but this digital signal processing background noise filtering of the handset has not extended to bluetooth headsets. Some bluetooth headsets have their own separate hardware mic noise cancellation built in, but that's a different matter.
Voice Isolation Mic Mode works very effectively with bluetooth headsets that don't have their own mic noise cancellation as long as it's a VoIP call. I've used it successfully across several apps in addition to FaceTime, but all VoIP and it doesn't yet seem to work for cellular voice calls over bluetooth. I'm curious about the technical reason for this.
Telcos buy and license hardware and software from several different vendors to operate their IMS cores which is the main network element that enables VoLTE, but if Voice Isolation Mic Mode works agnostically across several (all?) VoIP apps, I am trying to understand why it doesn't show up as an option during VoLTE calls.
Oh, I see. I wasn’t aware that the Voice Isolation mic mode worked across Bluetooth devices that don’t have their own noise cancellation method built in. That’s really quite interesting! I also wasn’t aware that it was app agnostic; I was under the impression that it only applied to FaceTime. Again, very cool.
In that case, it would be great to see it expanded to VoLTE/VoWifi calls. Knowing what I know now, I’m also curious as to the reasoning.