Do you often use Face Time, Zoom, Signal or even WhatsApp to make audio or video calls with your loved ones from your iPhone? A small adjustment can radically change the sound quality of your voice to make you heard better.
To each his own style. Some swear by texting, others prefer instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger or Snapchat, and still others love to chat live in audio or video. For these people, it is not always easy to be heard by your interlocutor when you do not have headphones or earphones. Surrounding noise tends to interfere with the smartphone picking up the sound of the voice. And the conversation can quickly become painful as soon as one is in a street where traffic is dense or in any other noisy environment. On the one hand, we shout to make ourselves heard, on the other, we stick our ears to the loudspeaker to try to distinguish the voice on the other end of the wire. Not practical. Unless you have an iPhone or iPad powered by iOS 15.
Indeed, Apple has integrated a small hidden setting to isolate, quite radically, the voice of the interlocutors. This setting is far from easy to find since it is not nested in the parameters of the device or even of the app and it is only activated once communication has been established. It works in several applications such as FaceTime, Signal, WhatsApp, Zoom, SnapChat or even Instagram, including when you try to join an Android device from your iPhone. Alas, impossible to activate it during a classic phone call. Its use depends only on the goodwill of application developers to integrate an API (application programming interface or application programming interface in French) designed by Apple in their apps. Here’s how to implement it. For the example we will use it with FaceTime.
Note: this setting can also normally be activated on a recent Mac powered by macOS Monterey. We were unable to test this feature.
How to improve the audio quality of calls from an iPhone?
The adjustment proposed by Apple to improve the quality of the voice consists in using a filtering thanks to an algorithm in order to isolate the human voice from the rest of the soundstage. The result can be quite spectacular but also a little surprising for the interlocutor when the algorithm struggles to do its job. What happens when the environment is really very noisy.
► Launch the chat app (FaceTime in our example), then make a call to one of your contacts.
► As soon as your correspondent picks up, slide your finger down from the upper right edge of the screen to access the iOS Control Center. At the top right is the current usage status of the microphone: standard microphone. Press it.
► You are now offered three choices: standard microphone, Voice isolation and Broad spectrum. Press on Voice isolation to implement Apple’s algorithm. Your voice is now isolated from the rest of the sound environment. You can stop yelling into the mic.
► The setting Broad spectrum as for him will capture at best all the surrounding sounds. Useful if you want your interlocutor to listen to the sounds of the sea or the countryside. To try.
► Warning, this setting is not saved. You will have to redo these manipulations as soon as you want to make a call in a noisy environment.