Former PM at a videoconferencing company here - this is a great great great idea. You should consider integrating with Blue Jeans (guess where I was a PM at), Zoom, etc. If it works well and you can get in touch with some folks at the company, you could probably get some promotion in their app directories.
Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
41–50 of 103 posts
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#42This (ahem) sounds fantastic.
I’m currently doing VC off an iPad while sat in front of my Linux workstation.
The workstation has no microphone. What kind of mic could I get for it, to migrate all my VC to the workstation?
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#43Former PM at a videoconferencing company here - this is a great great great idea. You should consider integrating with Blue Jeans (guess where I was a PM at), Zoom, etc. If it works well and you can get in touch with some folks at the company, you could probably get some promotion in their app directories.
Isn't the better idea to simply remove the keyboard noise? I think a few services do this already...
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any recommendation for mac?
krisp.ai is good but $3 a month
For what it's worth, I tried it and it was... not great?
Versus piping my audio through OBS as a way of using RNNoise and doing noise gating, OBS retains the original audio quality quite well and does a really good job of removing clicks/clacks/etc.
Krisp made my voice sound like I was talking through two tin cans and a string, and, at least in my environment, did not do a very good job of actually removing any of the background sounds.
I've also tried it in Discord (as it's integrated directly into Discord) and kept running into a problem of it deciding my own voice was noise and just cutting me out mid word.
They have a free tier (gives you 120min/week of noise cancelling), so anyone looking to try it definitely worth using that first. I'd suggest turning on audio monitoring in some headphones and listening to yourself a bit though and deciding if the quality is acceptable to you.
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#45Love it! I'm glad that you could bring mic-muting to the wider world outside the macOS Big Sur bubble. Appreciate the shoutout for Unclack!
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#46It isn't quite the same, but RNNoise is a neural-network based noise reduction aimed at dampening anything that isn't human voice. It works fantastic to me and almost always completely mutes my keyboard. (Sometimes it comes though a bit if I am talking at the same time.) This is easy integrated into Pulseaudio using PulseEffects ( https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects ). (The PulseEffects support is new, I used to use…
Seems like this would be great for multiplayer gaming. Anyone know how well PulseAudio works on windows these days?
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#47Cool! Windows please. Someone. Anyone.
There are a few options that let you use RNNoise. (I posted another comment a bit further up on how to pipe your audio through OBS to implement this. There are undoubtedly simpler options.)
In my experience, it does a great job cancelling out keyboard clicks and clacks. Even if I sit here and slam on my spacebar harder than I'd ever hit it even writing an angry email, it's cancelling it all. And I've never had an issue with it _not_ picking up my voice.
If you're just looking for _a_ solution to the problem, I'd give something with RNNoise a try.
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#48Maybe if those "modern" video-conference apps had one, decades old option that was (and still is) avaliable in
almost all gaming-oriented voice software (ventrilo, mumble, teamspeak, discord) called
PUSH 2 TALK
then this problem would be solved, same with the problem of kids/other people in the background (especially this)
but yea, we need AI/Blockchain based solutions that require thousands of hours of engineering effort that probably will be provided by some Startup and cost 15$.
It's insane how enterprise software is behind gaming in that particular matter, do those people even use their software?
edit.
What's PUSH 2 TALK?
PUSH 2 TALK is not TURN ON / TURN OFF switch where you actually mute yourself. It's that you talk while having some button being pushed down e.g MOUSE SCROLL (MOUSE3) (for me it's probably one of the most practical choices)
so in this case you're always muted unless you want to talk
Why it's so great? because you can e.g play game, write code, do stuff on your PC and when you want to mute yourself, then you don't have to try to find some shortcuts or even worse - put video-co app on focus and click mute button, but instead you just stop pressing your PUSH2TALK hotkey! :P
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
RNNoise is also available as a native voice filter in OBS and it works very well there.
For anyone going down this path, it's relatively easy to kinda use OBS as your audio pipeline for other programs. (Easy in the "for people on HN" sense, not easy in the "my mom would do this" sense.) Only caveat is that you need to leave OBS running in the background doing its thing whenever you need your microphone. (Instructions for Windows. The OBS stuff would be the same, you'll just need to figure out your own s…
Doing that on a Mac is...more complicated. There's only one company (Rogue Amoeba) that does virtual audio devices (https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/) and it's $100.
Incidentally I purchased an Elgato Wave:3 Mic (https://www.elgato.com/en/wave-3) because it includes a free virtual audio device for Mac, which piqued my curiosity. It turns out that Rogue Ameoba provides the extension for virtual audio devices, so it's a good value!
Another option for both Win/Mac is the Blue Yeti X (https://www.bluemic.com/en-us/products/yeti-x/), which has Blue Voice to denoise/noise gate/equalize audio without additional drivers aside from the base software (I use a headset which supports Blue Voice and it's ok, but def not as good as RNNVoice)
Re: Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
#50Cool idea for those who don't talk and type at the same time in a meeting. Would be an issue for me unforunately but boy I hope some of the people I have meetings with employ something similar. (fortunately my keyboard is quite quiet)