What is background noise? It is any unwanted sound that sits under the voice in a recording, such as traffic, fans or other voices. The speaker you want stays audible, but the noise hides soft consonants and endings, so a transcriber hears fewer words correctly.
Transcribe a recording
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Files up to 2 GB · export to TXT, MD, DOCX, PDF, SRT and VTT · speaker labels and timestamps · about 30 languages
Key facts
- Steady noise like an air conditioner is easier to live with than changing noise like chatter or a passing truck.
- Distance matters more than microphone price: moving the mic closer raises the voice against the same room sound.
- Software cleaning can remove hiss, yet aggressive settings leave watery, distorted speech that is harder to read for software.
- Noise often shows up in a transcript as dropped short words, wrong names and the odd line that nobody said.
What it looks like
[00:00:12] Speaker 1: Please send the invoice to the (fan hum) office by Friday.
[00:00:17] Speaker 2: Sorry, which (traffic) address?
// what the noise did to the text:
// heard as "to the offer by Friday"
// was said "to the office by Friday"
More
See the full list of languages, the tools and the glossary.
Frequently asked questions
Can noise be removed after recording?
Partly. Filters reduce steady hum and hiss. Chatter and music overlapping the voice are much harder to take out without damaging the speech.
What is the quickest way to cut noise at the source?
Record in a quiet room, put the microphone close to the speaker, and switch off fans and notifications before starting. Prevention beats repair.
Is background noise the same as crosstalk?
No. Noise is any unwanted sound. Crosstalk is a particular case in which several people talk at the same time, and it needs separate handling.
How does noise affect a transcript?
It causes missing words, wrong guesses for unclear sounds and sometimes invented text. Names and numbers suffer first, so check those against the audio.
Will the Potok bot still work on a noisy file?
The bot transcribes any supported file you send, and noisy ones give weaker text. Check names and figures, and use speaker labels only if voices are distinct.
Sources
Each source was opened by hand on the date shown. Pages change, so open the source if a detail matters to you.
- Background noise (Wikipedia), Wikipedia · checked
- Signal-to-noise ratio (Wikipedia), Wikipedia · checked
Try it on your own recording
Send your voice message, audio or video to @potok_now_bot on Telegram and the text comes back in the chat.
Open @potok_now_bot in Telegram