🎯 Voice AI Consulting
Get dedicated support and consultation to ensure your specific needs are met.
Consult an AI Expert

TLDR: Voice isolators separate human speech from background noise in real time. Developers can't integrate hardware solutions like NVIDIA RTX Voice or Apple Voice Isolation. Cloud services like ElevenLabs don't support real-time streaming. For real-time voice isolation, developer SDKs like Koala Noise Suppression offer cross-platform support with low latency and self-service integration.

What is Voice Isolation

Voice isolation extracts and enhances human speech from audio while suppressing background noise, music, or other speakers. Unlike simple filters, modern voice isolators handle both stationary noise (air conditioning) and non-stationary babble noise (e.g., café chatter.)

Why Voice Isolation Matters

Speech intelligibility, the percentage a listener understands, improves dramatically with proper isolation and impacts business metrics directly: Poor audio quality raises average handle time by 27% in call centers. Voice agents with clean input handle more complex queries successfully. Telehealth providers face compliance requirements that unintelligible speech jeopardizes.

For developers, integrating a robust voice isolator is essential for professional-grade audio applications.

The voice isolation landscape is divided into two categories: end-user tools that developers can only recommend, and developer SDKs that you can integrate directly into applications.

Voice Isolator Comparison: What Developers Can Actually Use

The voice isolation landscape is divided into two categories: end-user tools that developers can only recommend, and developer SDKs that integrate directly into applications.

End-User Tools (No Developer Integration)

NVIDIA RTX Voice and Apple Voice Isolation deliver great results, but only as system-level features. Developers can't embed these into their applications. They can only suggest end-users enable them.

NVIDIA requires specific GPU hardware (Windows/Linux only). Apple works exclusively on iOS/macOS. Neither provides APIs for programmatic control, making them unsuitable for products requiring consistent audio quality across your user base.

The fundamental problem with NVIDIA RTX Voice and Apple Voice Isolation is that developers can't guarantee that end users will have compatible hardware or remember to enable these features. E.g., a telehealth platform can't tell patients, "Please buy an NVIDIA GPU and enable RTX Voice before your appointment."

Cloud-Based APIs (Post-Processing Only)

ElevenLabs recently launched Voice Isolator as a cloud API for recorded audio cleaning. However, their documentation explicitly states it doesn't support real-time streaming. You upload an audio file, wait for processing, and download the processed file. Although this works for podcast editing, it fails for voice agents, conferencing, or any interactive application.

Adobe Podcast Enhance, known as Adobe Enhance Speech, and similar services from other players, such as Dolby, face the same limitation. They don't offer real-time streaming voice isolation.

Developer SDKs (Real-Time Integration)

Mozilla RNNoise, free and open-source, pioneered real-time noise suppression almost a decade ago. It's still used on many platforms offering virtual calls and videos. However, it lacks active maintenance and has started showing its age. Open-source benchmark comparisons show newer alternatives, such as Koala, significantly outperform RNNoise.

Krisp SDK offers commercial-grade suppression but has limited platform support, offering Python, Node.js, Go and C++ SDKs. SDK access requires filling out enterprise forms. Hence, one can't immediately test in production environments.

Koala Noise Suppression provides cross-platform voice isolation with self-service integration. It runs on web browsers (including mobile web browsers), iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, and Raspberry Pi. All processing happens on-device with no cloud dependency.

Choosing the Right Voice Isolator

For real-time applications requiring developer control: Koala offers the most practical voice isolator with immediate self-service access, cross-platform support, and consistent on-device performance. For specific scenarios:

  • Media editing (e.g., podcasts): ElevenLabs, Adobe, or Dolby (post-processing)
  • Enterprise apps for certain platforms: Krisp SDK (if you can wait for access)
  • Hardware recommendations: NVIDIA RTX Voice or Apple Voice Isolation (recommendation only, can't control adoption)

Only developer SDKs let enterprises control the audio quality users experience. End-user tools and cloud APIs may deliver great results in specific scenarios, but they can't provide the guaranteed, consistent performance production applications require.

Get Started with Voice Isolation using Koala

Ready to add voice isolation to your application? Here are quick start guides and API references organized by platform.

Voice Isolation for Web Applications and Browsers

Add noise suppression to any web application in minutes. Works across Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, including mobile browsers.

Voice Isolation for Desktop Applications

Cross-platform desktop support with unified implementation patterns.

Voice Isolation for Mobile Applications

Native SDKs for both platforms with consistent APIs and minimal battery impact.

Voice Isolation for Embedded Systems

Optimized for resource-constrained environments, including Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5.

Start Free

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a voice isolator?

A voice isolator is AI-powered software that extracts clean human speech from noisy audio in real time. Modern voice isolators use deep learning models to separate voice from background noise like traffic, keyboard typing, café chatter, and other environmental sounds.

Can voice isolation work in real-time?

Real-time voice isolation capabilities depend on the engine. Koala Noise Suppression offers real-time voice isolation. For real-time voice isolation, on-device solutions are the only options, as cloud voice isolation APIs introduce network delays, hence, are not a fit for real-time processing.

How much does voice isolation improve call quality?

Benchmark tests show modern voice isolation can achieve 4-5x improvement in speech intelligibility compared to older solutions.

Can I integrate voice isolation into my existing application?

Yes. Modern SDKs provide straightforward integration with consistent APIs across platforms. Implementation typically takes minutes rather than weeks, with immediate self-service access for testing and production deployment.

What's the difference between developer SDKs and end-user voice isolators?

Developer SDKs let you embed voice isolation directly into your application, controlling the experience your users receive. End-user tools like NVIDIA RTX Voice, Apple Voice Isolation, and Krisp are features or applications you can only recommend. Users must have compatible hardware and remember to enable it.

How do I evaluate voice isolation solutions?

Speech Intelligibility Index (SII), Speech Transmission Index (STI), and Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) are metrics used to measure speech intelligibility. Mean Opinion Score (MOS), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Analysis (POLQA), 3-fold Quality Evaluation of Speech in Telecommunications (3QUEST), and Non-intrusive Objective Speech Quality Assessment (NISQA) are some of the metrics used to measure speech quality.

Picovoice uses STOI to compare voice isolation solutions as it's a more advanced and objective (reproducible) metric than the others. You can choose the most appropriate one for your application.