When you set Voice Isolation, your smartphone starts aggressively processing the audio coming into your mic to reduce background noise. When we activated the setting on an iPhone 12, all background noise up to 20 feet away vanished — as did practically all traffic sounds. When we turned it on on my MacBook, the noises of both the laptop fan and my keyboard typing vanished.
In the process of isolating the voice, Apple appears to bring it closer; there’s less echo and room tone, making it sound as if you’re holding your phone to your face when you’re not. The trade-off is that your voice sounds more processed, although it always sounds processed when using apps like FaceTime or Zoom.
The only issues with Voice Isolation are two. For starters, it’s not a global setting, so you’ll have to enable it in each app you use for calls. Two, it is not applicable everywhere. Voice Isolation is made available by Apple via an API for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, however not all apps support it. On mobile devices, it has a strong track record: Snapchat, WhatsApp, Slack, Signal, and Instagram all support it, while TikTok does not. Zoom had it on iOS but not on the Mac, and there’s no way to enable it for any in-browser apps that we’ve found, so Google Meet and a few others are out.
