As someone who lives in a noisy city, voice isolation is an essential feature for my phone calls. If I don’t enable it, I cannot call anyone while I’m outdoors—background noises are just too loud for them to hear me. This is why I always enable voice isolation for phone calls on my iPhone. This is different from enabling noise cancellation on your AirPods, which merely filters background noise for you. During phone calls, voice isolation will filter background noises for the person you’re calling, allowing them to hear you clearly. Here’s how you can reduce background noises when you’re making phone calls using your iPhone, including how to set it up so it automatically turns on during calls.
Understanding the different mic modes on your iPhone
When you make a phone call using your iPhone, you have access to the following mic modes:
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Automatic: This is the best mode for most people. It will pick the best mic mode for whatever situation you’re in, such as Voice Isolation when there’s a lot of background noise and Standard when your call is on speakerphone.
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Standard: You get normal voice processing in this mode. Background sounds will be audible, but they’ll be filtered out slightly.
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Voice Isolation: This mic mode eliminates most background sounds and prioritizes your voice.
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Wide Spectrum: Try this to send completely unfiltered audio to the person you’re speaking with. Ambient sounds will not be filtered out at all.
As long as you’re using an iPhone XR, XS, or newer, most of these mic modes should be available to you. The Automatic mode is one of the new features added with iOS 18, so to use that, you’ll have to update your iPhone first.
How to select a mic mode on your iPhone
You can easily enable a mic mode manually while making a phone call on your iPhone. To do this, call someone (or receive a call) and swipe downwards from the top-right corner of the screen. This will work in all sorts of calling apps, not just the standard phone app. This will open the Control Center. Tap the Controls button up top and select one of the four mic modes under Audio & Video. Again, these are Automatic, Standard, Voice Isolation, and Wide Spectrum. Your selected mic mode will persist for that app until you change it.
Automatically enable Voice Isolation for phone calls
Credit: Pranay Parab
Most of my phone calls are fairly short, so manually turning on a mic mode when I pick up doesn’t usually occur to me. I recently discovered a way to automatically enable Voice Isolation mode for these phone calls, and it’s been quite helpful. With this, I no longer need to double-check if it’s enabled or not. To do this on your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual, and enable Phone Noise Cancellation. This automatically reduces ambient noise when you’re holding the receiver to your ear, but should leave speakerphone calls untouched.
