How to Get Rid of Background Noise on Video Calls (7 Ways That Work)
Everyone has been on the other side of it. Someone joins the call and there’s a dog barking, a TV murmuring in the background, traffic, a roommate in the next room, or the relentless clatter of a keyboard. You catch maybe every third word. You nod along and hope you didn’t miss anything important.
Now flip it around — that person is you. And the truth is, background noise doesn’t just make a call harder to follow. It quietly changes how people perceive you. You sound less prepared, less professional, a little less in control. None of that is fair, but it’s real.
We built Kleervox because we were tired of this exact problem. Below is everything that actually works, in the order we’d try it — starting with the fixes that cost nothing.
Why background noise costs more than clarity
Noise makes people work harder to understand you. That effort has to come from somewhere, so it comes out of their attention. Meetings run long because sentences get repeated. Details get missed. And you spend half the call bracing for the next interruption instead of thinking about what you’re saying.
The classic advice is “find a quiet room and close the door.” Great, if you have one. Most of us take calls from kitchens, shared apartments, cafés, co-working spaces, hotel rooms, and homes full of kids and pets. You can’t mute the world.
So the goal isn’t a silent room. It’s making sure your microphone doesn’t send the noise onward.
How to get rid of background noise on video calls
1. Move your microphone closer to your mouth
This is the single highest-impact change, and it’s free. The closer your mic is to your voice, the louder you are compared to everything else in the room. Doubling the distance between your mouth and the mic roughly quarters how strong your voice arrives — while the fan across the room stays exactly as loud.
If you’re using a laptop mic, you’re typically speaking from two feet away. A headset mic sits an inch or two from your mouth. That difference alone does more than most software.
2. Use a headset instead of your laptop’s built-in microphone
Built-in laptop mics are designed to pick up the whole room, which is precisely the wrong goal. They also sit right above the keyboard and the cooling fan — two of the noisiest things on your desk.
Almost any headset with a boom mic beats almost any laptop mic. You don’t need to spend much. Position the boom near the corner of your mouth rather than directly in front of your lips, where breath sounds are strongest.
3. Turn your input volume down, not up
This one is counter-intuitive, so people get it backwards constantly.
When you sound quiet, the instinct is to raise the microphone level. But that raises everything — your voice and the air conditioner equally. Worse, most systems apply automatic gain that hunts for something to amplify whenever you stop talking, so the room swells up in every pause between your sentences.
Fix the distance first (see above), then set your input level so normal speech is clear and leave it there.
4. Deal with the room, not just the microphone
Hard, bare surfaces reflect sound and make everything muddier. You don’t need acoustic panels. A rug, curtains, a bookshelf, or even taking the call from a room with a sofa in it noticeably reduces reflections.
Where you sit matters too. Point your back toward the noise rather than your microphone — face away from the window on a busy street, away from the open-plan desks, away from the kitchen.
5. Turn on your call app’s built-in noise suppression
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Discord all include some form of noise suppression. It’s worth switching on and costs nothing.
Two caveats. It has to be configured separately in every app you use, and browser-based calls often don’t expose the setting at all. It also tends to struggle with the harder cases — nearby speech, sudden clatter, anything that isn’t a steady hum.
6. Wear headphones to stop echo
If people say they hear themselves echoing back, that’s not background noise — it’s a different problem. Their voice is coming out of your speakers and going straight back into your microphone.
Headphones eliminate that path completely. It’s the most reliable fix there is, and it’s the one thing on this list that works every single time.
7. Clean your microphone with Kleervox
Everything above helps. But there’s a limit to what placement and room changes can do when the noise is a leaf blower, a toddler, or four people talking near your desk.
That’s the gap Kleervox fills. It cleans your microphone before your call app ever receives it, so the barking, the typing, the café hum, and the construction outside don’t reach the other side. Your voice stays natural.
Because it works at the level of your computer rather than inside one app, you set it up once and it applies everywhere — Zoom, Teams, Meet, Discord, Slack, browser calls, and recordings.
If you want the longer explanation, here’s an overview of AI noise cancellation and how it differs from echo cancellation. Managing a support team? There’s a separate guide to reducing background noise in a call center.
What to do when you can’t control your environment
Here’s the reframe that changed how we think about this: stop trying to win against your surroundings.
You are not going to negotiate silence with a neighbour’s renovation, a train line, or a two-year-old. What you can control is what leaves your microphone. Your room can stay noisy. The people on your call just don’t have to hear it.
That shift is what stops calls from being something you schedule your day around. You take them when they suit you, from wherever you happen to be.
Setting up Kleervox
It takes about a minute:
- Download Kleervox for your computer — it’s available for Windows and Linux today, with macOS coming soon.
- Open it and pick the microphone you actually use.
- In your call app’s audio settings, choose Kleervox as your microphone.
That’s it. From then on, every call sounds clean automatically — you don’t have to remember to switch anything on.
The free plan includes an hour of cleaning a day, which is enough to find out whether it makes a difference for you. If you want to hear the effect before installing anything, you can test it in your browser with your own microphone.
Your calls stay on your device
A lot of the calls people take are private — work under NDA, personal conversations, sensitive client discussions. So Kleervox cleans your audio on your own computer. Your calls aren’t uploaded, and they stay your business.
It also means the cleaning keeps working when your connection doesn’t. Only the call itself needs the internet.
Frequently asked questions
How do I reduce background noise on Zoom?
Start with mic placement and a headset, then enable Zoom’s own background noise suppression under Settings → Audio. If noise still gets through — especially voices or sudden sounds — clean the microphone before Zoom receives it, which is what Kleervox does.
Why can people still hear my keyboard when I’m using a noise-cancelling headset?
Noise-cancelling headphones cancel noise for you, not for the people listening. That feature works on the speaker side. What your callers hear depends entirely on your microphone, which is a separate thing.
Does background noise removal make my voice sound robotic?
It can, if the processing is too aggressive or you stack several noise removers on top of each other. If your voice starts sounding thin or words get clipped at the start, turn off your call app’s suppression and use just one layer.
Will a more expensive microphone fix my background noise?
Usually less than you’d hope. A $300 mic two feet away still picks up the room. A cheap headset mic two inches from your mouth usually sounds better on a call. Distance beats price.
Can I remove background noise from a call I already recorded?
That’s a different job — editing tools handle recorded audio after the fact. Kleervox works on live calls, cleaning your microphone in real time as you speak.
Stop apologizing for noise
“Sorry, there’s a lot going on here” is a sentence you can retire.
Work through the list above and most of it goes away. Get your mic close, wear a headset, stop cranking the input, and let software handle what’s left. Clean, professional audio shouldn’t require a treated studio or expensive gear — it should just work, wherever you happen to be.
If background noise keeps getting in the way of your calls, try Kleervox. We’d love to hear what you think.