Microsoft Teams noise suppression sits in Settings then Devices, and out of the box it runs on Auto. Auto decides how hard to filter based on what it hears. Low keeps most of your original signal and strips steady hum. High is the aggressive setting, and it is the one people misread: it is not simply the better choice, because it costs processor time and can thin your voice on the way through. Off has its uses too. This guide covers where each level lives and what it does to the sound of you. And if the control is greyed out on your work laptop, none of those levels are yours to choose. Somebody in IT already chose for you.
Where the levels live and what each one does
Click the three dots beside your profile picture and choose Settings. The Devices pane holds your microphone, speaker and camera choices, and the suppression control sits further down that same pane, checked August 2026. Levels include Auto, Low, High and Off. A change applies to your next call rather than retroactively rescuing the one you are already in, so set it before you join anything that matters. The pane is also where you confirm which microphone Teams is listening to, which turns out to be the root of more complaints than the filter itself.
- Auto: Teams picks the strength based on what it hears. The sensible default for most desks.
- Low: light filtering that leaves your voice largely intact. Good when the background is a steady hum rather than sudden bangs.
- High: the aggressive setting. It removes the most and asks the most of your processor.
- Off: no filtering at all. The right answer when you are sharing music or demoing an audio product.
Off matters more than people expect. Any filter built around speech treats a guitar riff or a product alert tone as garbage and quietly deletes it, so if you are demoing sound, switch the filter off first and warn the room that your keyboard is now audible. Everything else is a judgment call about how much of your own voice you are willing to trade away. That trade is the part the teams noise suppression settings screen never spells out, and it is where most of the frustration starts.
Why High is a trade, not an upgrade
Aggressive filtering works by deciding, moment by moment, which parts of the incoming sound are your voice and which are not. Push it harder and it becomes more willing to discard anything borderline. Human speech is full of borderline: sibilance, the tail end of a word, the breath before a sentence. Push far enough and listeners say you sound underwater, or slightly processed, without being able to name what changed.
The processor cost is real
High is more CPU-intensive than the lighter levels. On a current laptop with nothing else running, you will never notice. On a five-year-old managed machine already carrying a browser with thirty tabs, a VPN client and whatever endpoint agent your company installed, you might, and it usually shows up as audio that stutters rather than as a fan you can hear. If your voice started breaking apart the same week you switched to High, put it back to Auto for one call and watch whether the problem follows you.
Setting it up properly, start to finish
Start with the device, not the filter. In the Devices pane, confirm the microphone Teams is using is the one you are actually speaking into. A docked laptop with a headset attached can offer three or four inputs, and Teams does not reliably pick the one you meant. Our audio settings map walks through each control on that pane if you are not sure what you are looking at.
Then work in this order: set the level, make a test call, and listen back instead of trusting the input meter. Teams plays your own voice back to you, which tells you more in ten seconds than the moving bar tells you in ten minutes. If you hear yourself twice, or hear a lagging copy of the other person, that is echo in calls and no level will help, because your speakers are feeding your microphone. If you come through thin or intermittent, drop from High to Auto before you touch anything else. If the control is greyed out entirely, the answer is not in this pane at all, and our page on suppression greyed out sets out what your real options are. For the click path screen by screen, see how to turn on noise suppression.
Rooms and setups that change the answer
Open-plan offices and cafes
Babble, meaning other people talking, is the hardest thing for any filter to strip out, because it looks exactly like the signal the filter was built to protect. Auto handles keyboards and air conditioning well. It will not erase the conversation two desks over. In that room, a headset with a boom mic close to your mouth does more than any software setting can.
Managed laptops with locked policy
Tenant policy can restrict the control, and hardware or OS constraints can remove the path as well. When that happens the toggle does not return because you asked politely. What still works is changing the input: a virtual microphone installed at the operating system level presents itself as an ordinary device, and Teams uses whatever input you select. Our page on Krisp for Teams covers that route in detail.
Speakers nobody can hear
If people keep asking you to repeat yourself, check level before you touch filtering. A microphone set too low, or sitting under a desk, produces a signal so faint the filter has almost nothing to preserve. See mic not working or quiet for the order to check things in.
Common questions
Where is noise suppression in Microsoft Teams?
In Settings then Devices, further down that pane, checked August 2026. Click the three dots beside your profile picture, choose Settings, then Devices. Levels include Auto, Low, High and Off. If the control is missing or greyed, your tenant policy or your hardware path is the reason rather than a broken install, and reinstalling will not change it.
Should I use High or Auto?
Auto for almost everyone. It adapts to the room and leaves more of your voice intact. Pick High only when the background is loud and constant, and only after listening to a recording of yourself on that setting. High is more CPU-intensive and can thin your voice, which is a genuine cost on an older machine rather than a theoretical one.
Does the setting affect call quality?
It changes how your voice reaches other people, not how your connection behaves. Filtering happens before audio is sent, so heavier levels can make speech sound processed. It does nothing for a weak network. Dropped words and frozen video come from bandwidth, and no level of filtering will bring those words back.
Can I leave teams noise suppression on permanently?
Yes. Teams remembers your choice between calls, so Auto can stay on indefinitely and most people should leave it there. Switch it off deliberately for calls where you play audio: music, a video, a product making its own sounds. Then set it back, because Teams will not do that step for you.
Does Krisp replace the built-in setting?
It replaces the input instead. Krisp installs as a virtual microphone on Windows 10 or 11 and macOS, and you select Krisp Microphone in the app audio settings. Processing happens on your own device. The free plan gives 60 minutes a day of noise cancellation, resets at midnight GMT, one device, no credit card, verified August 2026.