You can enable voice isolation for iPhone calls automatically

As someone who lives in a noisy city, voice isolation is an essential feature for my phone calls. If I don’t enable this, I can’t call anyone when I’m outside; background noise is just too loud for me to hear. That’s why I always enable voice isolation for phone calls on my iPhone. This is different Enable noise cancellation on your AirPodsthat only filters background noise for you. During phone calls, voice isolation filters out background noise for the person calling you so they can hear you clearly. Here’s how to reduce background noise when you’re on the phone with your iPhone, and how to set it to turn on automatically during calls.

Understanding the different microphone modes on your iPhone

When you make calls with your iPhone, you have access to the following microphone modes:

• Automatic: This is the best mode for most people. It chooses the best microphone mode for whatever situation you are in, such as voice isolation when there is a lot of background noise and standard when you are calling on speaker phone.

• Standard: In this mode you get normal voice processing. Background noise is audible, but is somewhat filtered out.

• Voice isolation: This microphone mode eliminates most background noise and prioritizes your voice.

• Broad spectrum: Try this to send completely unfiltered audio to the person you’re speaking to. Ambient sounds are not filtered out at all.

As long as you’re using an iPhone XR, XS, or newer, most of these microphone modes should be available to you. The automatic mode is one of them new features added with iOS 18so to use that you have to do that update your iPhone First.

How to select a microphone mode on your iPhone

You can easily manually enable a microphone mode while calling on your iPhone. To do this, call someone (or receive a call) and swipe down from the top right corner of the screen. This works in all kinds of calling apps, not just the standard Phone app. This will open the Control Center. Tap the Controls button at the top and select one of the four microphone modes below it Audio and video. Again, these are Automatic, Standard, Voice isolationAnd Broad spectrum. The microphone mode you select remains for that app until you change it.

Automatically enable voice isolation for phone calls

Credit: Pranay Parab

Most of my phone calls are quite short, so manually turning on a microphone mode when I answer usually doesn’t occur to me. I recently discovered a way to automatically enable Voice Isolation mode for these phone calls, and it was quite useful. With this I no longer have to check whether it is enabled or not. To do this on your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio & visualand enable Phone noise reduction. This automatically reduces ambient noise when you hold the receiver to your ear, but speakerphone conversations remain unaffected.