An AI audio enhancer separates speech from background noise with a trained neural network and rebuilds a clean signal in real time. Unlike static filters, it adapts to unpredictable noise such as keyboard typing, sirens, and cross-talk. Koala Noise Suppression is an AI audio enhancer that runs entirely on-device, so audio never leaves the user's machine.
Koala Noise Suppression has become the developer's choice, especially for real-time audio enhancement. Developers can embed Koala Noise Suppression into their applications in minutes to enable speech enhancement and background noise reduction, resulting in improved engagement with high-fidelity media and premium audio features.
When to use an AI audio enhancer
Any scenario that requires consistent and tonally correct speech can benefit from speech enhancement - whether audio or video, recorded in the past, or streaming in real time. Some popular use cases are below:
Call Centers
Improves service quality by removing background noise, such as phone ringing or agents speaking and typing.
Real-time Agent Coaching
Boosts agent confidence by removing disruptive noise from all sides of the call and enhancing the accuracy of AI-generated responses with higher speech intelligibility.
Virtual Meetings
Fosters employee productivity in virtual meetings by keeping the focus on the speaker and excluding other voices in the background - even though they connect from noisy cafes, open offices, or homes.
Live Streaming
Elevates listener and viewer experience by enhancing the speakers' voice clarity - whether broadcasting for national television or Twitch.
Podcasting
Enhances speech, making voice recordings sound as recorded in a professional studio without requiring a post-production clean-up. Yet, Koala Noise Suppression is effective in post-production, too!
Telehealth
Allows patients to understand healthcare providers easily by minimizing distractions in the background, even if healthcare providers have to connect from busy places like emergency rooms.
How an AI audio enhancer works
Classic noise gates and spectral filters assume noise is steady. Real environments are not: doors slam, dogs bark, a second conversation starts. An AI audio enhancer is trained on pairs of noisy and clean recordings, so it learns what human speech looks like and removes everything else, including noise it has never heard, frame by frame as the audio streams.
On-device vs cloud AI audio enhancement
Cloud enhancement APIs ship every frame of audio to a server and back, which adds latency to live calls and streams and sends user audio to a third party. On-device enhancement processes audio locally: no network round trip, nothing transmitted, logged, or retained, and it works offline. It is also cost-effective at scale. In Picovoice's open-source noise suppression benchmark, Koala cuts the STOI distance to clean speech from 0.0848 (unprocessed) to 0.0415, ahead of RNNoise at 0.0748 (lower is better).
Give it a try!
The Picovoice team developed an open-source benchmark to help developers scientifically compare Koala Noise Suppression with other Audio Enhancers. Yet, the easiest way of comparison is to hear the outputs of different Audio Enhancers for yourself.
While listening to the original recording, click on the Audio Enhancers: RNNoise by Mozilla, and Koala by Picovoice to see the difference:
If you want to try it with your audio files or in real time, check out the live speech enhancement demo below:
What's next?
Developers can start building with Koala Noise Suppression for free by creating a Picovoice Console account. Get a quick start in just three Python lines, or follow the real-time microphone noise removal recipe for a complete, runnable example. Explore the other Koala Noise Suppression SDKs, or contact sales to discuss your project.
Frequently Asked Questions
An AI audio enhancer is software that uses a trained neural network to remove background noise and improve speech clarity. It learns the structure of human speech from data, so it handles unpredictable, non-stationary noise that static filters miss.
Yes, if the engine is efficient enough to process audio frames as they arrive. Koala Noise Suppression runs in real time on-device across desktop, mobile, web, and Raspberry Pi, so live calls and streams are enhanced with no cloud round trip.
Background noise is a major cause of transcription errors, and running noise suppression in front of a speech-to-text engine is a common production pipeline. The gain depends on your audio and engine, so test with your own recordings.
Yes. On-device enhancement processes audio locally, so recordings are never transmitted, logged, or retained. That makes it compliant by design for regulated audio in healthcare, finance, and public sector.
