Nvidia’s latest AI trick made our mediocre webcam mic sound practically professional

Jan 31, 2025 03:13 AM - 1 week ago 11190

Sean Hollister

Sean Hollister is a elder editor and founding personnel of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Nvidia mildly blew our minds successful 2020 erstwhile its graphics cards gained the expertise to delete practically each the inheritance sound from our audio calls pinch a free app, and now the company’s doing it again. My workfellow and Verge elder news editor Richard Lawler conscionable fired up Nvidia’s just-announced “Studio Voice” characteristic connected his RTX 3070 — and it made his Logitech webcam’s atrocious built-in microphone sound downright respectable.

Take a listen:

The first clip you’ll perceive is Richard connected his podcasting mic, past the crummy Logitech C922 webcam mic, and lastly, the webcam mic with Nvidia’s characteristic turned on.

What a world we unrecorded in.

It’s portion of an update to the free Nvidia Broadcast app, arsenic is different caller characteristic called “Virtual Key Light” that we recovered somewhat little impressive, astatine slightest successful our very first test. It’s expected to “deliver moreover lighting, arsenic if a beingness cardinal ray was defining the shape and magnitude of an individual.” Here are Richard’s earlier and aft shots of that:

Screenshot by Richard Lawler / The Verge

Screenshot by Richard Lawler / The Verge

Lastly — yes, it’s creepy arsenic heck — Nvidia is still letting you deepfake your eyes to ever look astatine the camera, and here’s Richard’s illustration of that combined pinch the caller Virtual Key Light feature:

Screenshot by Richard Lawler / The Verge

Technically, Nvidia says these features require an RTX 4080 aliases RTX 5090 and are “not recommended for gaming,” and we’re guessing that’s because they deed the GPU hard. “The cardinal ray seems to beryllium stretching my 3070 to its limits,” says Richard. “But the sound point works, I conscionable couldn’t play a crippled astatine the aforesaid clip based connected really overmuch VRAM it’s using.”

Nvidia says the caller update besides “improves sound value pinch the Background Noise Removal feature, adds regard stableness and subtle random oculus movements for a much earthy quality pinch Eye Contact, and improves foreground and inheritance separation pinch Virtual Background.” You tin find the Nvidia Broadcast app here.

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