Background noise on calls went from minor annoyance to genuine problem somewhere around 2021, when half the workforce started taking meetings from kitchens, coffee shops, and apartments with thin walls. Five years later, the problem hasn’t gone away. It’s gotten more specific. The best noise cancelling apps in 2026 don’t just muffle a barking dog. They clean up echo, handle cross-talk, and fix accent clarity issues that make global meetings harder than they need to be.

I’ve tested most of the options out there. Here’s what’s worth using, ranked by how well each handles noise on real calls.

Krisp: best overall noise cancelling app for calls and meetings

Krisp started as a noise cancellation company and built outward from there. Most meeting tools bolted on noise suppression as an afterthought. Krisp built its architecture around voice audio processing from day one, and you can hear the difference.

The big one is 2-sided noise cancellation. It removes background noise from your microphone and from incoming audio at the same time, with over 40 decibels of reduction. That second part is the one people underestimate. You can control your own environment, but you can’t control the person calling from an airport lounge. Krisp cleans both sides without making anyone sound robotic or compressed.

Krisp has since expanded into a full Voice AI platform that covers the entire meeting lifecycle. The AI Note Taker works without sending a bot into the meeting. It runs at the system audio level, so nobody on the call sees anything different. You get live transcription in 16+ languages, AI summaries, and action items with assigned owners. There’s also an AI chat feature for searching past meetings. I’ve been using it to pull up pricing objections from the last month of calls, and it’s saved me hours of digging through recordings.

Then there’s Accent Conversion, which nobody else in this space offers. It works both ways: speakers can activate it to come across more clearly, and listeners can enable it to better understand others. For teams spread across five or six countries, this changes how meetings feel day to day. Fewer “sorry, can you repeat that?” moments.

Krisp runs on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and most other platforms, across Mac, Windows, Chrome, iOS, and Android. Setup takes two minutes. Voice processing for noise cancellation happens on-device, not in the cloud, and the company holds HIPAA, SOC 2, and PCI DSS certifications.

Best for: Sales teams who don’t want a bot making clients uneasy, remote teams across time zones, and managers in back-to-back meetings who can’t afford to miss action items. If you take calls regularly and want clean audio plus meeting intelligence in one app, this is the one.

NVIDIA Broadcast: best free option (if you have the right hardware)

NVIDIA Broadcast uses the Tensor cores on RTX graphics cards to remove background noise and room echo in real time. If you already have an RTX 2060 or higher, it’s free, and it’s good. It creates a virtual microphone and speaker that work with any communication app, and the processing runs entirely on your GPU.

The catch: it only works on Windows machines with supported NVIDIA hardware. No Mac, no mobile. It also does audio and video cleanup only. There’s no transcription, no meeting notes, no accent features. NVIDIA built it for streamers and gamers first. Remote workers with the right GPU adopted it later.

Best for: Windows users who already own an NVIDIA RTX card and want solid noise cancellation without paying for it.

Built-in noise suppression (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet)

Every major video conferencing platform ships with noise suppression now. Zoom lets you adjust sensitivity. Teams offer Auto, Low, and High modes. Google Meet applies it automatically.

These handle common background noise well enough: keyboard clatter, fan hum, light street noise. Where they struggle is in louder environments, room echo, and multiple noise sources at once. They also only clean your microphone, not the audio coming from other participants. If you call from a quiet home office, the built-in option is probably fine. If you’re regularly in noisy spots, you’ll hit the ceiling fast.

IRIS Clarity: built for enterprise voice quality

IRIS Clarity focuses on bidirectional voice isolation, separating the speaker’s voice from surrounding noise on both ends of a call. It targets enterprise and contact center environments where call quality directly hits revenue.

IRIS does noise removal well, but it stays in its lane. No meeting notes, no transcription, no accent conversion. It’s more specialized than Krisp, and priced for enterprise budgets. If your contact center’s main headache is audio quality on high-volume calls, IRIS is worth a look.

SoliCall: server-side noise management for call centers

SoliCall skips the per-device install entirely. It processes audio server-side, which makes deployment easier when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of agents. The noise reduction and echo cancellation are tuned for telephony and VoIP.

It’s not built for the individual user on Zoom. This is a specialized tool for organizations running high-volume voice operations.

Choosing the right noise-cancelling app

It depends on what you’re trying to fix. If background noise is your only issue and you work from a quiet room, the built-in suppression in Zoom or Teams will cover it. If you have an NVIDIA GPU, Broadcast is free and handles noise well.

But if noise is part of a bigger problem (and for most remote workers, it is), think about what happens after the audio gets cleaned up. Clean audio leads to better conversation. Better conversation produces more accurate transcripts. More accurate transcripts produce summaries and action items people can actually trust. One misheard word early in that chain changes what someone acts on the next day.

That’s why I keep coming back to tools that fix the meeting itself, not just the recording that comes after.