Chromebooks Will Soon Support Noise Cancellation For External Mics

Google is positioning Chrome OS and Chromebooks as the ultimate productivity weapons, especially in this day and age of remote work and schooling. Ironically, they are also one of the last to jump on one of the most important bandwagons in this day and age of remote work and schooling, video chats and conferences. Many of the apps and services for these require Windows or macOS or even Linux, and those that do run in Web browsers sometimes don't even work well compared to those other operating systems. Case in point is the rather complicated case of noise cancellation, something that may be soon to Chrome OS at long last.

Most of the video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet offer fancy and creative ways to cut out the visual noise or embarrassing background behind you. They often leave the handling of actual audio noise to each platform's or device's noise cancellation support. Unfortunately for Chrome OS users, Chromebooks have neither.

That might be changing soon as a change in Chromium source code reveals a new flag that will toggle whether Chrome OS will display input noise cancellation UI or not. This, of course, presumes that the hardware actually supports noise cancellation, which it detects from headsets.

Unfortunately, this also implies that the feature only activates for external headsets that support the feature. Android Police notes that it doesn't include support for the internal microphones of Chromebooks themselves, implying that the hardware doesn't support noise cancellation either. Hopefully, Google will come up with a software solution like it always does.

Chrome OS is definitely shaping up to become an even more powerful productivity device, receiving features that most computer users may have taken for granted on other platforms. That includes even just the ability to scan documents which, while rarer these days, can still be a pain when the need does arise. Google has also been optimizing its own Google Meet to work better on Chromebooks, many of which have less powerful hardware compared to Windows laptops.