Teams noise suppression is a filter that runs on your own machine before your audio leaves it, separating the sound of your voice from the sound of your room and sending on mostly the first. It lives in Settings then Devices, it offers Auto, Low, High and Off, and on the average desk it should sit on Auto. That is the short version. The longer question, the one behind the search, is whether to trust it: what leaving it on costs you, and why it did nothing whatsoever about the echo, the buzz, or the words that vanished from your last call.
What it actually removes
The filter hunts for speech and treats everything else as disposable. Steady sound is the easy case. A fan, a projector hum, traffic through a window: these have predictable shape, and a filter strips them so cleanly the other side never learns they were there. Sudden sound is harder but usually handled, whether that is a door, a dog, or the particular clatter of a mechanical keyboard while you take a note mid-meeting.
- Steady background: fans, air conditioning, road noise, server hum.
- Impact sounds: keyboard clatter, a mug landing on a desk, shuffled paper.
- One-off events: a door, a dog, a siren going past the window.
- Not reliably: other people talking, because their speech looks like yours.
That last line is the one to hold on to. A filter built to preserve human speech has no principled way to keep yours and drop the colleague on a phone call behind you. Some tools handle babble better than others; none of them solve it. The second honest limit covers everything that was never noise to begin with, which is most of what gets blamed on this setting by people asking whether teams noise suppression works at all.
What it cannot touch
Three problems get misfiled as noise, and no level fixes any of them. Echo comes first. If you run call audio through laptop speakers, your microphone hears the other person and posts them back to themselves half a second late. That is a loop rather than background sound, and the answer is headphones. Our page on echo in calls carries the full set of checks.
A mic that is clipping or too quiet
When your input level is wrong, filtering makes matters worse rather than better. Too quiet and there is barely a voice left to preserve. Too loud and the signal distorts before the filter ever sees it, so the filter faithfully cleans up a recording that was already broken. Fix the gain first, and mic not working or quiet walks through the order.
Third is your connection. Words that disappear mid-sentence, a voice that turns metallic, video freezing while the audio carries on: that is packet loss, and it happens well after the filter has finished its work. Turning suppression off will not recover the missing words, and turning it up will not either.
Deciding where to leave it
Leave it on Auto and forget it. That is the right answer for the large majority of calls, and the reasons to deviate are narrow. What follows is how to make the decision once rather than re-litigating it every meeting. Open the Devices pane and confirm your input before anything else, since the wrong microphone explains more complaints than the wrong level does. Our audio settings map explains each control there.
Set the level to Auto. Record a short test call and listen to yourself, checking that your voice still sounds like your voice rather than checking that the room went silent. If it sounds processed, step down to Low. If your background is a constant loud hum that Auto is letting through, try High for one call and listen again, keeping in mind that High is more CPU-intensive and can thin your voice. Switch it off deliberately when you plan to play audio into a call, because music and product sounds are noise as far as the filter is concerned. Our guide on how to turn on noise suppression also covers switching it back, which is the step everyone forgets. If the control will not respond at all, read suppression greyed out rather than reinstalling.
Situations that change the calculation
When your machine is older
Filtering costs processor time, and the heaviest setting costs the most. On a laptop that already struggles with a video call, aggressive filtering can turn smooth speech into something that arrives in pieces. If that sounds familiar, our page on robotic or choppy voice separates a processor problem from a network one.
When the setting is not yours to change
On a managed laptop the control can be restricted, and then the question stops being which level to use. Teams sends on whatever input you select, so a virtual microphone that filters before Teams ever sees the audio is the route that still works. Krisp for Teams explains how that fits together.
When muting beats filtering
No filter is as reliable as being muted. In a call with twenty attendees where you speak twice, the keyboard question is moot. Our notes on mute etiquette and shortcuts cover the keys that make that habit painless.
Common questions
What does Teams noise suppression do?
It filters your outgoing audio on your own computer, keeping speech and discarding background sound before anything is transmitted. Fans, keyboards, traffic and one-off bangs are the sounds it handles best. It runs from Settings then Devices, with levels including Auto, Low, High and Off, checked August 2026, and Auto suits most desks.
Should it be on or off?
On, at Auto, for ordinary meetings. Turn it off only when you are deliberately playing sound into the call, such as music, a video or a product's own alerts, because the filter treats those as noise and removes them. Remember to turn it back on afterwards, since Teams keeps whatever you last chose.
Does it work well enough to rely on?
For steady and sudden background noise, yes, and most colleagues will never hear your air conditioning. For other people's voices, no, and no consumer filter fully solves that. It also does nothing about echo, a badly set input level or a weak connection, all of which are frequently mistaken for a suppression failure.
Will it remove the voices around me?
Not dependably. Nearby speech is the hardest category for any filter, because it shares every characteristic the filter is designed to protect. Expect some reduction, not silence. A headset with the microphone close to your mouth helps more than any level change, since proximity does physically what software has to guess at.
What else can I use alongside it?
Krisp installs a virtual microphone on Windows 10 or 11 and macOS with processing on your device, plus an AI meeting note taker, and the free tier gives 60 minutes a day with no card, verified August 2026. NVIDIA Broadcast is free but needs an RTX 2060 or better and runs on Windows only.