What the model does with typing
A key press is a burst of sound a few milliseconds long: a sharp attack, energy spread across many frequencies, and no pitch. Voiced speech is the opposite, with a pitch and its harmonics that change over tens of milliseconds. RNNoise, the neural network Noise Remover runs, analyses the audio in 10 ms frames and follows the pitch of the voice, so a click stands out as something that is not speech, whether it lands in a pause or between two syllables.
In our lab test at full intensity, keyboard typing dropped by 11 to 13 dB in the speaker’s pauses, less of a drop than any steady noise we tested. The voice moved by 0.2 dB at most, whether the typing was as loud as the voice or 20 dB quieter. With typing as loud as the voice, measured intelligibility (STOI, where 1 matches the clean voice) rose from 0.72 to 0.81. How we measured.
| Noise | Noise removed during pauses, in dB | Change in voice level |
|---|---|---|
| Keyboard typing | 11 to 13 dB | 0.0 to −0.2 dB |
Who it helps
- Tutorial creators recording a voice-over while they demonstrate on a computer, for YouTube or an online course.
- Streamers and gamers cutting highlights, whose commentary picks up keys and mouse.
- Remote workers and students recording a presentation, a lesson or notes at their desk (lectures and meetings).
- Writers and journalists recording an interview while they type their notes.
Recorded your screen and your voice together? Import that video: the app cleans its soundtrack, and you lay the cleaned audio back under the picture in your editor, or, with Pro, export the video itself with the clean sound (cleaning a video’s soundtrack). A computer fan humming under the typing goes in the same pass, since steady noise is handled too (fan noise).
The app cleans recordings, not live calls or streams
For live audio, use the noise suppression that some calling and streaming tools include, and keep Noise Remover for what you publish afterwards: the voice-over, the highlight clip, the recorded lesson. For a stream, save the clip you want to post, import it, and its soundtrack is cleaned on the phone.
Settings for typing noise
- Leave the intensity at the default
Typing cost the voice almost nothing in our test, and the default already lets the model take off what it can. Compare a sentence you typed through with the Original/Cleaned switch.
- Listen where you typed and talked at once
Clicks between words go first; the ones under your words are the real test. Flip between Original and Cleaned there.
- Leave the low-cut on for desk thumps
Keys hitting bottom and a palm landing on the desk send low thuds; the 80 Hz filter turns down the deepest part of them.
- Trim the last click
Recordings made at a computer often end with the click that stopped them. Move the end handle just before it.
Clean your voice-over on the phone, offline.
Free · Android 8.0 or later, 64-bit
How to record with less typing noise
- Get the phone off the desk. A phone lying on the same desk as the keyboard picks up every keystroke through the wood, as a thump. Hold it, stand it on a folded towel, or put it on another surface.
- Put a mat under the keyboard. A desk mat or a folded cloth damps the clack of keys bottoming out and the desk’s own resonance.
- Keep the microphone nearer your mouth than your hands. Your voice should be the loudest thing it hears.
- Type softer during takes, or record in two passes: the demonstration first, the commentary after.
- Mind the hardware. Clicky mechanical switches are the loudest kind; a quieter keyboard and a silent-click mouse remove the noise at its source.
- Silence notifications. Switch the phone and the computer to Do Not Disturb before a take: a chime in the middle of a sentence is easier to avoid than to fix.
For the rest of a desk setup, see the phone recording guide.