Do AirPods Have Noise Cancellation?

Not all AirPods models come equipped with noise cancellation technology. Apple currently offers Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) on its high-end AirPods Pro and AirPods Max models.

These specific models are designed to provide an immersive audio experience. They actively analyze and oppose external sounds, effectively canceling out ambient noise from your surroundings.

How to Use Noise Cancelling on AirPods

AirPods’ noise cancelling technology is ideal for situations where you need to tune out external noise and fully immerse yourself in your audio content. It’s perfect for activities like listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks while commuting, working in a busy office, or studying in a noisy environment.

To fully understand the ways to use noise cancelling on AirPods, let’s first discuss the noise control modes that AirPods have.

Noise Control Modes on AirPods

Noise cancelling on AirPods works in four modes(since the introduction of the second generation of AirPods Pro.) Those modes are active noise cancellation, AirPods transparency mode, adaptive, and off. Let’s go through each of those.

Active Noise Cancelling on AirPods

The ANC feature on AirPods Pro and AirPods Max creates a private auditory space.

Model
Active Noise Cancellation

The peaceful space ANC creates allows you to focus solely on your music, calls, and podcasts without distractions from the outside world. ANC technology effectively cancels out ambient distractions, from the hum of an airplane to the bustle of a busy café, allowing you to focus solely on your audio content. 

AirPods Transparency Mode

On the other hand, AirPods Transparency Mode is designed to let in ambient sound, making it ideal for situations where you need to be aware of your environment.

This mode uses built-in microphones to amplify sounds around you. The latter enables you to listen to music and podcasts or make calls while still hearing traffic, announcements, or conversations. It’s perfect for situations where safety and awareness are paramount, such as walking in the city or waiting for flight calls at an airport.

The Differences Between Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency Mode

When comparing active noise cancellation technology against AI-based noise cancellation algorithms, it’s crucial to understand that the former relies on physical sound wave manipulation to reduce noise, while the latter uses intelligent algorithms to filter and adapt to ambient sounds dynamically, enhancing the clarity and quality of audio.

The primary difference between Active Noise Cancellation and AirPods Transparency Mode lies in their intended use cases:

• Active Noise Cancellation is about isolation. It creates a private auditory space by blocking out the external world, allowing you to immerse yourself in what you’re listening to without interruption.

• Transparency Mode is about integration. It blends your audio content with the natural sounds of your environment, keeping you connected and aware of your surroundings without removing your AirPods.

By toggling between these modes, users can customize their audio experience based on their current needs, environment, and personal preference, making AirPods incredibly versatile tools for both focus and safety.

Adaptive Noise Cancelling AirPods Mode

This feature has been presented in the second generation of AirPods Pro. This innovative technology takes noise management to a new level by dynamically blending the existing Transparency and Active Noise Cancellation modes, tailoring the audio experience to your surroundings and interactions in real time.

It introduces features such as Adaptive Noise Control, Personalized Volume, and Conversation Awareness that respond to your environment automatically to fine-tune your audio experience.

Adaptive Noise Control combines Active Noise Cancellation with AirPods Transparency Mode to tailor the level of noise control for you based on the changing environment’s noise conditions. It is also quite easy to switch to, as shown above.

When you begin speaking with your AirPods Pro (second generation), Conversation Awareness automatically reduces your media volume and amplifies voices in front of you. It looks like this:

Once the conversation finishes, the volume is restored, and the noise-control setting is reverted to its previous state. You can also manually end a conversation by pressing and holding the AirPods stem or swiping up on it.

Now that we know the AirPods noise cancelling modes, let’s look at how to activate noise cancellation on AirPods.

How to Turn On Noise Cancelling on AirPods?

Activating noise cancelling on AirPods Pro is a straightforward process.

Switch Between Noise Cancelling Modes on AirPods Pro

Experience the ultimate silence with AirPods Pro noise cancelling technology, seamlessly adapting to your environment for the perfect audio experience. To activate noise cancelling on your AirPods Pro:

1. Press and hold the force sensor on the stem of your AirPods Pro until you hear a chime. This switches between ANC, Transparency, and OFF modes.
2. You can also control these settings directly from your connected iPhone or iPad: Go to Settings > Bluetooth, tap the “i” next to your AirPods Pro, and select Noise Control to choose your preferred mode.

Switch Between Noise Cancelling Modes on AirPods Max

For AirPods Max, the process is similarly user-friendly:

1. Press the noise control button on the top of the right ear cup to toggle between ANC and Transparency mode.
   
2. Adjust these settings via your iPhone or iPad by following the same steps as with the AirPods Pro.

Switch Between Noise Cancelling Modes on iPhone or iPad

Both AirPods Pro and AirPods Max allow you to switch noise control modes directly through your connected device:

1. Open Control Center on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Press and hold the volume slider.
3. Tap the Noise Control icon to select between Noise Cancellation, Off, and AirPods Transparency Mode.

Switch Between Noise Cancelling Modes on a Mac

For Mac users, adjusting noise control settings on AirPods Pro or AirPods Max is straightforward:

1. Ensure your AirPods are connected to your Mac via Bluetooth and selected as the output device.
2. Access the Control Center on your Mac from the menu bar.
3. Click on Sound, then select your AirPods.
4. Choose your mode: From here, you can toggle between Off, Noise Cancellation, and Transparency mode directly.
   

This quick process allows Mac users to seamlessly switch noise control modes to match their needs without interrupting their workflow.

The Reasons Behind AirPods Noise Cancelling Not Working

If you’re experiencing issues such as AirPods noise cancelling not working with active noise cancellation, ensure that they’re correctly seated in your ears. Additionally, check for any firmware updates, and restart your device.

Sometimes, simply cleaning your AirPods can resolve the issue, as debris can block the microphones used for ANC.

However, while AirPods’ ANC technology is adept at canceling noise, it might not fully eliminate distracting background voices during meetings or calls.

This is where Krisp’s AI Noise Cancellation feature comes into play. Unlike traditional ANC, Krisp focuses on eliminating background voices and noises during calls, ensuring crystal-clear communication without any distractions.

Cancelling Noise with Krisp

Using advanced noise cancelling software, Krisp elevates the standard of virtual communication by intelligently distinguishing and eliminating unwanted sounds. This, it facilitates a distraction-free dialogue that benefits every participant in the call.

For an in-depth understanding, consider looking into a noise cancellation quality evaluation, which provides insights into how Krisp’s capabilities stack up against traditional methods.

Krisp takes the concept of noise cancellation to a new level, going beyond the capabilities of Airpod Pro noise cancelling technology to ensure crystal-clear communication during calls. While noise cancellation on AirPods focuses on reducing ambient noise for the wearer, Krisp enhances the audio quality for all parties involved in a call.

It actively analyzes and filters out background noise from both ends of a conversation, ensuring that only clean, clear audio is transmitted and received.

Here’s Krisp in action:

Wrapping Up

AirPods noise cancelling technology significantly improves listening quality by reducing unwanted ambient noise. However, when it comes to ensuring the utmost clarity during calls and meetings, particularly in noisy environments, Krisp’s noise cancellation technology takes audio quality to the next level. By integrating Krisp with your AirPods, you can enjoy an enhanced auditory experience that transcends the limitations of traditional ANC technology.

Frequently Asked Questions

The post Your Ultimate Guide to AirPods Noise Cancelling appeared first on Krisp.

Communication is just as important in your work or business, as it is in your personal life and your relationships with your family, friends and loved ones. At any given point in time, it’s important that you’re passing the accurate messages across, it’s crucial that you’re not misunderstood. Hence, communication is key.

And in this day and age, you’ll have to agree with me that communication is majorly about phone calls (whether VoIP or otherwise), video conference calls, podcasts, video interviews, and whatnot.

But there’s one common thread that runs through every single one of these means of communication, and that is NOISE. Noise is like that vicious little mosquito that flies close to our ears and makes annoying hums that disrupt our focus. And just as we are about to squash it, it flies away only to return again and again and again.

There are countless tools, and noise cancelling software and apps that claim to be the best at noise canceling but in this post, let’s take a look at the top ones:

1. KRISP Noise Cancelling Software

In search of the best noise cancellation software? Look no further! Krisp stands out as a real-time noise-cancelling app for Windows 10, offering the capability to eliminate background noise during calls, setting it apart from tools that only address noise in recorded audio after the fact. A noise cancellation quality evaluation reveals that Krisp significantly enhances call clarity by actively suppressing background noises, making it superior to many alternatives. 

Basically, there are tools that help you remove noise from recorded audio (after the video has been recorded), but there is a serious shortage of tools that help you to remove noise in real-time such as while you are making or receiving a call. 

Here are a few features that set Krisp apart from others:

• Use with any communication app

It’s compatible with any conferencing, streaming, voice chat and recording apps that let you change audio devices. On the spot, it works with over 800 such apps, so you won’t have any trouble setting it up.

• Hear only human voice

With the help of machine learning, it identifies the voice of the person speaking into the microphone, locks on to it and removes every other sound in the surrounding that is not the speaker’s voice.

• Remove noise on both ends of a call

Krisp doesn’t just make you hear better by removing the noise from your caller’s end, it also removes the noise in your environment so that your caller can hear you better. So it works both ways your end and your caller’s end making it productive with bi-directional noise removal. So you can hear them as clearly and as noiselessly as possible even if they happen to be taking your call at an NBA game.

• Audio processing is done locally

Krisp also guarantees that all their audio processing is done locally, meaning your voice and audio data aren’t stored in or sent to any servers.

• Free to use

And in case you were wondering. Yes, it’s free. With the free plan, you get a set number of free noise cancellation minutes per day depending on your account type. For an unlimited usage, you can consider upgrading to a Pro plan. Check out the Krisp’s pricing plans for more information.

• It is currently available for download on Windows and Mac.
  

You can check out the demo below:

[demo-new]

2. IZOTOPE RX7

This is another noise cancelling software in the market, a lot of people go for it for its ability to pick up the most disturbing of audio recordings and transform them into clear and noiseless mirror images of what they once were.

It enjoys massive patronage from all across the board, from the newcomer to those who aren’t exactly newcomers but are also not veterans yet, to the industry veteran themselves.

It prides itself as being the tool of last resort, the one that solves the problems others could not.

The RX7 has an assortment of features that make it the foremost audio repair tool:

• Dialogue contour

With dialogue contour, you literally can improve the intonation in a spoken dialogue in order to polish and refine the recording.

• Dialogue de-reverb 

With the dialogue de-reverb, you can remove reverberant signal content from spoken dialogue thanks to a new machine learning-based algorithm that runs it. 

• De-rustle

As the name implies, de-rustle removes all forms of distracting rustle from your dialogue. An example of a rustle it removes is the noise from the body or clip-on microphone known as a lavalier microphone.

• Dialogue Isolate

This helps you to eliminate the background noise and allows your dialogue to speak more clearly.

• The Breath Control module 

Sometimes while recording, our breath is picked up by the microphone and that’s heard as noise. The breath control feature identifies and removes such noises in vocal recordings and dialogue.

• De-bleed 

The de-bleed feature prevents your audio entertainment from leaking out of your noise cancelling headphones.

There have been complaints that RX6 (the predecessor to RX7) might be problematic, in that it sometimes hangs when you click on quit and leaves you with no option than to force-quit it. There have been no such complaints about the RX7 (or at least not yet).

3. AUDACITY

Audacity is a free, open-source, cross-platform noise cancelling software that is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux computers.

Once downloaded, this noise cancelling software can be used by anyone looking to do some of the most basic editing and refining of their audio files, so whether you’re an entrepreneur just starting out and looking to jumpstart your own podcast or you’re a spoken word artist who’s looking to make a decent break into the markets. Audacity is your guy.

A few features that make it appealing are:

• Ease of use 

Although the user interface might be considered old and clunky by some, you can certainly rest assured that locating its important editing tools at the main menu bar is a breeze, the learning curve for this tool is pretty mild and gentle, as it’s easy to understand the way most of the controls work.

• Noise reduction

To get this app to do your bidding, all you need do is highlight the portion of the audio that you need to polish or edit, the tool then inspects the highlighted part and automatically eliminates any unwanted sounds or other distracting noises and just before it affects those edits, it allows you to check them with the preview function and decide whether or not you are satisfied with the edits as they are.

• Free

It’s free and requires no financial investment whatsoever down the road. So if you’re a newcomer and you’re confused by all the information about the so many different editing software you can potentially choose from, so much so, that you can’t seem to settle for one, then you might want to give Audacity a try first.

As it will get you familiar with the basics of audio editing and equip you with the knowledge that will enable you to make an informed decision about which audio editing software you should transition to when the time comes. Think of it as learning to drive a car, at a free driving school.

The tool does have its downsides, you might be unable to boot it up sometimes or it may crash while you’re using it at other times.

Also the recording you’ll get from this tool might not be as high-fidelity as those from other paid software in its category.

Read next: How to remove background noise in Audacity?

4. NOISE GATE Noise Cancelling Software

Why do we have gates? Pretty straightforward if you ask me, it is to restrict entry or exit. And in the case of Noise Gate, as the name implies, it does restrict entry or exit of noise.

it is one of the best noise cancelling software which when used with VoIPs like Skype can eliminate background noise, creating a much better calling experience for you whenever you make calls. 

The idea is for you to be able to call from just about anywhere. Even if that be on a matchday beside noisy NFL cheerleaders.  

• To work, this software routes audio through an audio input to an audio output, why? To be able to analyze the level of the audio and determine whether its average level is higher or lower than a certain threshold. 

If the audio level is found to be higher than the threshold, it is bypassed (allowed entry) however if it is found to be lower then the gate closes and the audio is cut (entry is restricted) all of these happens in real-time.

• To get more functionality you can decide to use the software with a virtual audio cable, as that enables it to act as a noise gate for either a sound input like a microphone or a sound output like speakers.
• Tools such as this can be used by people from all across the spectrum, whether they be the average Joe down the street who just wants to call his buddies and bring them up to speed with the latest happenings over the week, or the one who runs a call center with a lot of employees and noise is starting to become an issue.

One major drawback some users have complained about this noise cancelling software is that there are times when all of a sudden the software just stops working and then generates a pop-up, next thing you know it exits you from the page and leaves you wondering where you went wrong.

5. OCENAUDIO

This is an excellent free noise cancelling software that runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It is suitable for podcasters, spoken word artists or just about anyone looking to create audio entertainment from home.

It helps them to eliminate unwanted noise from their recordings. 

• Ease of use

It’s easy to make and edit recordings with Ocenaudio and unlike other tools, large files do not cause the application to hang, or crash.

• User interface

Ocenaudio has a pretty intuitive user interface that has a mild learning curve, all open files are arranged in a list on the lefthand side of the screen and you can click any one of the files to reveal its waveform.

• Usage

Just like Audacity, it allows you to left-click and highlight the parts of an audio file that you want to edit. Once highlighted you can click on the noise removal option to immediately eliminate all the noise from that section.

Also if you need to effect a similar change across different sections of the same audio file instead of doing it one after the other, Ocenaudio allows you to select all the affected parts at once and edit them all at the same time. It also allows you to work on different audio files at the same time.

The major drawbacks of this tool are that it is not open source. For a free tool of its stature, it’s better for it to be open source just so that more hands can tweak the codes and deliver even more powerful outcomes.

It also doesn’t currently support effect stacks.

6. ACCUSONUS ERA BUNDLE

This is another stellar noise reduction tool that runs well on Windows and Mac. It includes a set of excellent noise reduction plugins that helps you, in surgical terms, to take a scalpel and remove the numerous “bad cells” in your audio recording.

A few features that stand this tool out are:

• Noise remover 

With ERA noise remover you can easily reduce or outrightly remove unwanted noise from the air conditioner, fan, refrigerator or even the wall clock.

• Reverb remover

Reverb makes your audio sound as though it’s bathed in echoes. These echoes are usually caused by room acoustics. Reverb remover quickly removes the excess echo and put the spotlight back in the audio.

• Voice leveler

Sometimes during voice recording some gain inconsistencies appear. These are usually caused by the movement of the speaker or microphone or both but thanks to vice leveler you can remedy all that with a single turn of the knob.

• De-esser

Sibilant consonants (like “ch”, “z”, “s”, “sh” and “j”) are not very welcoming when heard in dialogues or audio recording. But not to worry, with the de-esser you can polish the audio and rid it of any signs of sibilance whatsoever.

OVER TO YOU

There is no perfect tool for the job. The tool to use depends largely on the nature of the job, and the budget you’re looking to work with.

Besides these tools, you can use AI noise-cancellation tools like Nvidia RTX Voice. The Nvidia RTX Voice plugin is an AI noise-cancellation tool tailored for Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards. Leveraging advanced AI capabilities, it excels at removing background noise from your video streams and calls.

Much like Krisp, RTX Voice establishes a virtual microphone and speaker system within your setup to effectively eliminate disruptive background noise.

Sometimes you might need more than one tool to get the job done and at other times you might just need one. So the key question is, what’s the job?

Have you ever used any of these pieces of software before? If yes, what was your experience with them? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section.

The post 6 Best Audio Noise Cancelling Software to Remove Noise appeared first on Krisp.

Do you easily get distracted and feel frustrated while working remote? We share 7 proven things you can do to enjoy productive remote work lifestyle.

Gone are the days when the workforce was monotonous — you go out of your home to a dedicated building, space or office with drab cubicles and return at the close of the day. Today, with the explosion of technology and the dotcom with the domestication of PCs and mobile devices, the work lifestyle has changed and a lot of persons and organisations around the world are embracing the remote work lifestyle for increased productivity and flexibility. Since 2005, the world population of remote workers has grown by over 140% creating new opportunities for individuals and allowing them to choose their working hours.  

As interesting and fascinating as that is, the problem with the remote work lifestyle is a lot of remote workers struggle with how to create remote workspaces and routines and maintain a productive and creative work-life balance from home that is free of distraction. 

According to the Buffer State of Remote Work survey for 2019, 84% of remote workers work from their home. That means that most people work and live in the same place which is the biggest struggle remote workers have: unplugging after work. 

It is true that remote work allows you a lot of flexibility and you get to spend more time with your family and go on vacations but as a remote worker you could be caught up in a lot of mess and frustration if you don’t put in some checks and balances to this new lifestyle. 

Your home could be equally or more distracting, especially if you have kids around or you live in an environment surrounded by neighbours who fire up all sorts of powerful audio machines or take your being around as a licence to intrude your privacy. Aside from that, you could also be your own worst enemy as you have the liberty to do whatever you like and be lazy to meet deadlines. 

Below are 7 proven incredible things you should do to help you seamlessly work remotely, break distraction links and shoot up your productivity. 

Create a Work-Mode Ambience

When I started freelancing I worked from anywhere in the home — on my bed, on the sofa in front of a TV (huh!), and often in a messy room with bits of everything scattered all around. I would cringe on why I couldn’t get much done on time and often feel stressed out and not motivated. But here was the answer staring at me in the face — my lifestyle was killing my vibe, productivity and creativity and that needed to change. 

To be an effective remote worker, you’ve got to be intentional about creating a workspace for yourself at home. This is key and you don’t need to break the bank to make it happen. If you’ve got an extra room you could convert it to your office and tone it up with things that give you the vibe to work. You should also consider having lots of free space by getting rid of things that aren’t needed. To do this you should ask yourself these 3 questions: 

• “Do I really need this to get my work done?”
• “Does this give me the motivation to work?”
• “Is this important to keep?”

For every item you answered ‘NO’ to, you don’t need them and throwing them out will help you achieve a comfortable workplace that’ll reduce distraction and increase your productivity.

What if you don’t have an extra room? Well, pick a favourite spot and declutter it. Ensure what you really need for work is what you have around you. Personally, I wouldn’t advise you to use your bedroom, as you may be tempted to take unnecessary naps. Also, you should invest in comfort for the sake of productivity and ensure you consider ergonomics when setting-up your workspace. Poor ergonomics can be a real problem as you’re going to spend lots of time in your workspace. You don’t want to sit on a chair that aches your back or strain your legs.

You could also change work locations once in a while by taking time out to a co-working space or going to the coffee shop if you need a new ambience. Co-working spaces are particularly helpful as they are designed to help you achieve maximum productivity with minimal cost. 

Block Out the Noise

Regardless of where you decide to work, there’s always going to be one common denominator: Noise. 

Work from your home and your neighbor’s home-alone dog will bark you out of focus like cops march out criminals. Work at the coffee shop down the street and expose yourself to traffic noise and coffee shop chatter, work from a co-working space and be at the mercy of the noise from other remote workers sharing your space. In all these cases, there’s nowhere you can enjoy a business call without getting distracted by the noise, don’t even think of a conference call, that’ll be chaos.

[demo]

One thing you can do however, is take advantage of apps like Krisp which integrates with thousands of third-party apps and allows you to make and receive noiseless calls by filtering out noise.

Go Green

According to a Harvard report when we work in an ambience of greenery, we achieve a 26% boost in cognition and lower sickness and stress by 30%. A proven way to boost your productivity and concentration is to include some greenery in your workspace. Aesthetic plants such as Areca Palm, Chinese Evergreen, Snake Plant, Warneck Dracaena, are good examples of plants you can keep at a strategic location in your workplace. According to a study at Exeter University, this will help you improve productivity by 15%. Sometimes, little things such as ensuring enough natural lighting could also increase your mental energy and effectiveness at work.  

You can also place real plants at strategic locations where you work. They help filter the air because carbon is stored in plants. They are also beautiful to see and will help you achieve a more peaceful and enjoyable atmosphere.

Fix Your Schedule to Your Prime Hours

It is often said that the morning hours are probably the most productive period. A lot of us rush to do the most in the morning. While this is awesome, not everyone is a morning person. Some of us are at our best in the afternoon, or in the evening, or at night when others are asleep. For example, I have different peak periods. I do very well like a lot of people in the morning, after 2 hours nap in the afternoon and late at night when others are asleep. These are times I don’t joke with or allow people to interrupt me with distractions and it has helped a lot.

You have to know what works best for you and leverage on your flexible schedule to accommodate your work patterns: take frequent breaks as when you feel exhausted. You may take a walk, listen to cool audio to stimulate your brain instead of trying to force it. 

Throw Your Phone Out of the Room

You may think that having your phone with you to check one or two things as they pop up is a nice idea, but it’s not. Nowadays there are several apps to help us stay productive but in most cases, it is best to remove your phone from your workspace or turn it off for the period you are working. But sometimes, this may be uneasy if you use your phone as a hotspot when you have to go online or use slack. A simple solution is to use some app freezing software to prevent notifications from social accounts from popping up. 

You should know that your phones have an impact on your mental health and emotions. The dopamine responses in the brain spur us to engage in pleasure-seeking behaviour where we use our phone. 

In another research, it was found that after hearing or feeling an alert on one’s phone the rate of errors made was about the same as if they had actually answered the call or message and the probability of this errors increases by 23% after getting a text and 28% after getting a phone call. Your phone can be a productivity killer and you have to keep it off to avoid distraction.

Set Reasonable Boundaries

One major form of distraction that seems unavoidable if you work at home is interruptions from family members, friends and neighbours. If you have little kids, they may mess up the house and your spouse may need you urgently to help with a few things. Or your neighbour may come to knock on your door to tell you about the leaking water pipe outside the home — because they know you are always around. These may kill your creativity and distract your focus from finishing through with work on time. 

You would save yourself these distractions if you notify your neighbours and family that you would not entertain them at your working hours. If you have little kids you might want to consider engaging the services of  a nanny to assist you with the kids. This will free up some time for you and let you concentrate on work.

Have a To-Do List

If you really want to have a smooth lifestyle as a remote worker you need to prioritize your activities and a to-do list will help you get a lot done faster. The idea is not to follow some rigid pattern, but to have something that serves as a guide and saves you time for thinking or worrying about what to do at a particular moment. As soon as you wake up, your to-do list will give you a sense of direction and tell you what task to do at a certain time.

On your to-do list, you could have a set of routines, for morning and evening. This helps you to know when to commence work and when to end. Your morning routine may look like this: 

• (6:00 a.m.) Wake up from bed 
• (6:10 a.m.) Do some light exercises 
• (6:30 a.m.) Shower and prepare for the day
• (7:00 a.m.) Get the kids ready for school 
• (7:30 a.m.) Make coffee and have breakfast while listening to an audiobook 
• (8:00 a.m.) Write
• (8:30 a.m.) Start work

Having a to-do list also helps you regulate your work time so that you can rest and attend to other things, including family. In the evening, you may time yourself to finish work by 5:00 p.m. and take some time out with family and friends. This simple habit keeps you committed and disciplined and would make you more productive as a remote worker.

Eat Well and Exercise

You’ve probably heard about Isaac Newton getting buried in his work so much that he forgets to eat lunch — it happens a lot to people working alone and on a task, they are passionate about. When you get deep into your work you might get tempted to skip meals and eat unhealthily, this is dangerous to your wellbeing and productivity in the long run.

The overwhelming task at hand and the race to beat deadlines can make you not care about what you eat. As a result, you settle for junk food and carbonated drinks. This is not only dangerous for your health, it also reduces your productivity level. According to the Population Health Management journal, there is a 66% increased risk of loss of productivity associated with unhealthy eating habits, and 50% increased risk of low productivity for rare exercise.

You should also consider light exercise that helps stimulate the brain and keep you active. This will improve your mental awareness, reduce health-related illness and increase your productivity and agility at work and in every aspect of your life.

Wrapping up

Productivity is not a one-off thing that you do it’s a lifestyle and you have to adjust and adapt yourself to it regularly as your circumstances change. You may have a very productive remote work life before you start your own family, but when you finally do, there’s going to be a lot of changes and new distractions you have to deal with. You’ll need to adapt and evolve. Working remotely is one of the most fascinating and joyful things to do and you have to stay focused and develop positive habits that will help you to successfully adapt. 

The post 7 Ways To Achieve Productive Remote Work Lifestyle appeared first on Krisp.

Now, if you’re a newcomer to the remote work world you’re welcome, but fair warning, you’ll definitely get confused by some of the terms that people (clients and remote workers) throw around, but there’s nothing wrong with that because we have you covered and we’ll make sure  you start speaking fluent remote work language in no time. 

That said, this blog post will open your eyes to some of the commonest remote work terms and their meanings.

Krisp

This is an AI-powered noise cancelling app that helps you make and receive calls just about anywhere regardless of the amount of noise in the background. Imagine the way a water filter works: dirty water goes in and clean water goes out. Krisp works much in the same way: noisy audio goes in, and crisp, clear, noiseless audio goes out. It works on both end ensuring you and your caller enjoy noise free calls.

[demo]

Webinar

Webinar is short for (web-based seminars) and it’s just like any real seminar or conference that you attend in your city, only this time around it is run on the web (internet) and it packs a lot of multimedia features like screen-sharing, white boards with writing tools, surveys etc. A webinar makes it possible to deliver content in real time to people from all over the various time zones.

Wi-Fi

The term Wi-Fi (short for wireless fidelity) is a wireless networking technology whose primary function is to connect devices to the internet. With Wi-Fi you can connect devices such as computers, be they laptops or desktops; tablets; smartphones; wearables; printers; light bulbs or just about any device (with internet capabilities) to the internet. 

Brick-and-mortar business

A Brick and mortar business refers to the traditional street-side business that has a physical presence usually constructed from bricks and mortar. In such businesses, customers walk into the building and buy products and services. With the proliferation of online, web-based businesses like “Amazon.com inc” and the likes, it is now imperative to explain what a brick and mortar is.

Co-located company

A co-located company is one whose employees form teams that work together on projects. These teams usually work together in the same physical location, and thus can have face-to-face collaborative meetings. Compare this companies that only have hybrid teams.

These types of companies usually have very little to no opening for remote workers.

Digital nomad

Digital nomad is a term used to describe people who travel all over the place while working remotely. The term nomad refers to nomadic people who never stay put at any given place but prefer to move from place to place. Most remote workers travel from country to country, so depending on your nationality you might need to check with the embassy of your destination country to see if you can travel visa-free or if you’d need to get a visa.

Digital work

Digital work also referred to as ‘virtual work’ forms the bulk of the work that remote workers do. These jobs are usually very convenient for remote workers since they can usually be done from devices such as computers (laptops and desktops), tablets, or smartphones as long as there’s an internet connection.

Distributed team

A distributed team simply refers to a group of people who work together collaboratively but are usually separated by geographical location. It’s very easy for remote workers to join and thrive in teams like this as opposed to working in co-located teams. Also having teams like this, allows businesses access to more talents who would have otherwise been unable to join the team if it were co-located. 

Flex time

Flex time (short for flexible time) is just as the name implies, and it means one can choose to have a flexible work schedule and it does not have to be based on the one-size-fits-all 9 to 5 arrangement that is common with most workplaces. This can work pretty well for someone looking to offer services on a remote basis.

Freelancer

A freelancer is a self-employed person who offers his services in exchange for pay usually on a contract basis, it could be per-hour, per project, per month or any other pre-agreed basis. Freelancers are one of the chief beneficiaries of the gig economy. Any skills can potentially be used to freelance, you can be a freelance writer, an infographics designer, a software engineer, or a web designer. To become a freelancer all you need do is learn a skill that’s in demand. 

Gig economy

Gig economy, also called the freelance economy, refers to an economy where temporary, and short-term jobs known as “gigs” are the order of the day. One where businesses prefer to sign short-term engagement contracts with freelancers and independent contractors rather than full-time workers who rarely change positions. The internet plays a key role in connecting most of these gig workers to their clients and customers. 

Hybrid teams

A hybrid team is one in which all team members need to work together on interdependent tasks but they are hardly ever all in the same location together, some team members work in the same locations while others work remotely from just about anywhere in the world often across multiple time-zones.

Coworking space

A coworking space is an office environment where all manner of creatives (freelancers, remote workers, digital nomads, startup employees and entrepreneurs) can work . Think of it like a coffee shop only here you’ll need to register and you’ll  get more than just coffee and free WiFi you’ll also get office amenities like printers, scanners, a mailbox, snack stations etc. Long story short it was created for remote workers.

Remote employee

A remote employee or remote worker is just like any other employee of a company, only that they work outside of the central office location. A remote employee can work from home, from vacation on some beach in Miami, from a local coworking space, from a coffee shop or just about anywhere else where they can access their work tools.

Blog

This piece of article you’re currently reading is a blogpost on the krisp blog. A blog (short for Weblog) is an online journal, diary or informational website. It usually displays posts in reverse chronological order meaning the latest posts appear first. In this day and age, a remote worker needs a blog to help position themselves as thought leaders, to increase their visibility and to help them acquire more clients.

Chatbots (Bots)

A bot (short for robot) is a piece of software, designed to simulate human conversation, whether written or spoken. Remember the bots that talk to you when you call the customer service line of your utility company? Or the chat bot that pops up on a site introducing itself as (insert name) and asking how it might be of help to you? Yes those are bots.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) simply put are indicators that you set for yourself to show that your business is moving in the right direction.

As a remote worker you sometimes tend to be a bit laid back and unproductive because you often work from home or other “non-work” environments. Having realistic, time-bound and measurable KPIs can help you boost your productivity. 

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an internet marketing model where anybody can essentially buy visits to their site. How does it work? You place your ad on a host’s site and each time your ad is clicked your host site receives a predetermined fee. Popular search engines such as Bing and Google offer PPC services. 

Cookies

Computer cookies are not programs, they are simply text files that gathers information about your browsing behavior and send such information to the websites that you visit, thereby making your browse through the internet even more efficient. Cookies are the reason why you don’t need to re-enter your login details each time you visit a site.

Cache

First of all, it’s pronounced as “Cash” not “Catch” or “Cashay”. A cache is usually a hardware or software that helps improve your computer’s efficiency and performance by storing recently used data temporarily so that it can be quickly accessed at a later time. Remote workers, especially competent ones, are usually working on a tight schedule so any gains in time is more than welcome.

CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is an acronym for (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). CAPTCHA  is a type of challenge–response test that is used in computing to determine whether the user is a human or a spam robot. It distorts letters, images or numbers and then asks the user to re-type those numbers or letters in a box provided.

Encryption

Encryption in this context refers to encoding or manipulating your data in such a way that no one can have access to it except those whom you have authorized. As a remote worker with files and documents stored in the cloud, encryption prevents unwanted access to your or your clients’ data.

Malware

Malware (short for “Malicious Software”) is an umbrella word for all computer software programs designed to cause damage to devices, steal data, and do all manner of unwanted actions to a computer. A remote worker’s worst nightmare is a malware attack.

Common examples of malwares are trojans, spyware, viruses, ransomwares and worms.

Growth hacking

Growth hacking is a buzzword that’s bandied around very commonly but it’s often misunderstood. It simply refers to strategies geared towards growth. In the case of a remote worker, it’s the synergic use of technology (blogs, vlogs, email-marketing, social media) and data analytics ( A/B testing, Heat mapping, Share metrics)  to grow and market ones brand.

Growth hacking is becoming more popular and more widely accepted because it’s much cheaper than traditional marketing through television and newspaper ads.

Cloud storage

Rather than store your digital files and documents on a hard drive or a solid state drive and risk losing them, cloud storage allows you to store them on the internet in the cloud. This grants you an “anytime-anywhere” access to your data. As remote workers, cloud storage makes it easy to access cloud-based files remotely and allows you to collaborate with team members on a distributed team. 

Internet of things (IoT)

The idea of the internet of things started between the late 80s and early 90s, and it simply seeks to connect physical objects to one another by first connecting them to the internet, thereby enabling them to send and receive data through the internet. This allows devices to “talk” to one another something that they wouldn’t do otherwise. A simple example of an IoT device could be a light bulb which can be switched on using a smartphone app.

Virtual reality (VR)

This refers to an artificial 3D environment created using computer technology, the user puts on a headset or eyewear to be able to interact with that environment, feel it, explore it and manipulate it. VR is useful in a wide range of sectors, such as the commercial real estate where it makes real estate tours easier and in medical training where it allows medical students to perform surgeries without putting lives in danger.

Telecommuting

This refers to the practice of working from home rather than commuting to work in a central office location, while taking full advantage of telecommunication means such as, but not limited to, ( the internet, video conferencing, cell phones and email). As telecommuters, you can also work from other “none-home” locations such as the coffee shop just a few blocks from your apartment.

Wrapping up

This list is by no means exhaustive, in fact you or anyone else would be hard put to find such a list. So just in case you were looking for some term but you couldn’t find them here, please be kind enough to drop such a term in the comments section and rest assured we’ll review it and hopefully include it.

The post Meaning of Remote Work & 28 Terms You Need To Know appeared first on Krisp.

The good news for you as an employer is that having a remote team provides you with access to a talent pool which is not restricted by location. As an employee, there’s good news too, one is, you have the freedom and flexibility to work without having to commute or stay away from family. But that’s just on paper, in real life, things are a bit different.

If your team doesn’t meet face to face, then there’s a pretty high chance that communication will suffer. If team members are siloed, you might as well forget about mutual trust and collaboration and with remote teams, it’s usually difficult to see which workers are overwhelmed with work and those whose skills are underutilized. 

But in spite of these and many other challenges, all manners of stats have shown that remote work is here to stay. Because more and more companies are seeing that the advantages far outweigh the challenges of having a remote team. 

Why should you even care about remote work?

Because the numbers don’t lie. The stats say there’s a steady rise in the number of people jumping on the remote work bandwagon in the US. More and more companies, especially new ones are seeking freelancers and independent contractors driving the demand for remote workers up by 81 percent between 2014 and 2017 according to data from Upwork.  

A 2017 Employee Benefits Report by the Society for Human Resource Management revealed that over 60 percent of companies now offer telecommuting benefits to those who want it. 

Research by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor of Economics has also shown that remote work actually works, it decreases worker attrition and increases productivity. He pointed out in his research that remote workers concentrate better and on the average took less sick days or prolonged breaks when compared to their on-site counterparts and it saves employers about $2000 per annum, per employee, on real estate costs.  

Remote work’s major downside: Miscommunication

In simple terms miscommunication arises when we are unable to understand one another in a way that drives progress in the direction of the overall goal of the company– that goal could increase in sales for instance, or increase in word-of-mouth adverts etc. 

These communication challenges are even more pronounced with companies that work with remote teams and expectedly the damage from such challenges is much more severe. 

Various studies have pointed this out, one such study published by the Harvard Business Review shows that remote workers who don’t get to interact well and as such always get incomplete stories and never the full picture are more disconnected or alienated when compared to onsite workers.

How can you solve these communication issues as a team leader? How do you ensure that everyone is being carried along, contributing their quota, working towards a clearly communicated overall goal?

One way is to simply scrap the concept of remote teams in its entirety and ensure that all employees are on site, after all you’ll get to interact with them physically. But that’s not going to be easy, worker attrition will increase and you’ll lose valuable talents. 

So the only other feasible option is to identify the issues, their effects and lay out clear, time bound strategies to solve such problems. And finally to double down on those strategies. 

Here are 4 communication problems leaders encounter with remote teams and some ways to solve such problems.

Issue #1: Lack of face-to-face interaction

If you’ve closely observed the way we interact as human beings, you would realize that our most important communications are done without words. 

In fact, experts have argued that 70 percent of communication is non-verbal and that includes workplace communication. “What are non-verbal cues,” you might ask “and how come they are so important?”

For starters Body language can tell you how urgent or serious an issue is; depending on the situation, eye contact can convey confidence or sometimes lack of it; appropriate facial expressions can show approval or disapproval; firm handshakes exudes trust, confidence and loyalty; tone of voice can express worry, fear or concern; gestures and movements can show enthusiasm. I can keep going but I suspect you get my point already.

With remote teams, unfortunately, most of these subtle hints are usually lost, because most interactions occur virtually via email, chats, calls,  and even if you have a video conference call you only see what the screen shows you, thus there’s usually a hindrance to accurate flow of information through the company’s structures.

How to deal with it?

Change the way you hire remote workers

The best place to gain an insight into how well a person communicates is during the interview process, so take advantage of this opportunity to see how well a prospect can sell herself. Make sure communication skills rank highest among your hiring criteria.

Some might argue that one interview is not enough to form an opinion on how well a person can communicate, if you share this sentiment, then you can consider having more than one interview.

After your initial rounds of interviews, you should now be able to gauge how well they communicate via writing, on calls, and other virtual means, but that’s not all, ask if they are down for an in-person interview, you’ll learn a lot from a face-to-face interaction with them.

To have a well balanced opinion on the prospects being interviewed it might help to have several persons conducting the interview so that each can score the prospect and then you can take an average of the scores to make a choice.

Set the tone for Communication

If you’re a team leader, you need to understand that your team will find it easier to follow your footsteps if they see that you’re an effective communicator, so the onus is on you to set the kind of example you want them to emulate. Give them updates on a regular basis, check-in with them on their various projects, write your emails the way you want them to write theirs. 

Be very clear about how you want your team members to communicate. Provide written guidelines on what kind of messages need to be sent, to whom and when. Provide written guidelines on how team members are expected to communicate with one another. This will help to remove any ambiguities that they might occupy their minds and also make it easier for them to ask you questions about communication.

These guidelines are even more necessary if you have a diverse team scattered across different cultures, continents and time zones. You’ll do well to acknowledge any cultural, time or language barriers and suggest ways to interact effectively in spite of them. For example, if there are some team members who are English as a Second Language ESL speakers you might want to discourage the use of slang in the team.

If circumstances permit, at least once a year, try to convene a meeting of some sort where the whole team gets a chance to meet face-to-face. 

Exploit the best technology

Without technology virtual teams would be dead on arrival. Take advantage of tools and software that make communication easier, faster and much more seamless. Below is a list of some tools that your remote team can take advantage of, 

• Chat tools: Slack, Twist, Google Hangouts
• Screen recording tools: Loom, Camtasia, Screencastify, Screenflow
• Project management: Asana, Basecamp, Podio, Trello, Jira
• Web and video conferencing tools: Zoom, Krisp, Cisco Webex, Google Meet
• Collaboration and prototyping tools: Adobe XD, Evernote, Google doc, Invision, Marvel
• Scheduling tools: Meetingbird, Calendly, WhenIsGood, Doodle
• Workflow automation tools: Integrify, Zapier, Flokzu, Microsoft Flow, Monday

You might need to saddle someone on the team with the responsibility of researching all the possible tools and determining which will be the best fit for the team. Once you’ve settled for the tools you consider most suitable, then provide adequate training to make sure everyone is using them to their fullest capacity.

Issue #2: Technology malfunctions

Like we said earlier, technology is the oxygen that remote teams depend on, cut off their supply of oxygen and they’ll die a slow but sure death. That said, there’s hardly anyone you know who has never experienced a malfunction with a certain software or a WiFi connection at some point or another, sometimes it even happens during an important virtual meeting. At other times you might it difficult to hear due to some background noise from an electrical appliance, and there goes your seamless communication.

How to deal with it?

It sure sounds counter-intuitive, but having bad WiFi happens to be worse than having no WiFi at all. So plan for this likely mishap by budgeting for hardware solutions such as a dedicated bandwidth and if that also fails have plans for an audio non-VoIP conference call.

If you’re like me, you need some amount of quiet to be able to think straight and get any meaningful work done, you can use Krisp to cancel out background noise and enjoy your virtual meeting or work.

[demo]

Issue #3: It’s a scheduling nightmare

If you have a team that’s scattered across several time zones, such that some members’ night time is your day time, it might be a real hassle to find a common meeting time that works well for all parties. It will mean that someone on the team will always have to sacrifice by meeting outside the normal business hours. They have to wake up in the middle of the night tired, groggy and clearly stressed out, this inhibits productivity and can whip up tensions in the team 

Also, it makes it difficult to monitor how your team is working. Are they working the required hours or are they slacking off? Are they answering customer support questions in a timely manner or are they delaying it? Because if you’re in Chicago you might find yourself waiting longer for a remote worker who’s probably asleep in Moscow to respond to an urgent email.  

How to deal with it?

One way to get around this problem is to make a point of rotating the meeting times so that all members get to sacrifice at some point rather than having permanent meeting time where just a few people will have to sacrifice all the time. It helps to preinform the team members about this before they join the team. 

In cases where time differences make it impossible to settle on a meeting time that works for all, you can split the group and have separate meetings or have it with the members who can make it and  then record it for those who can’t attend live so they can watch it on their own time.

Rather than collect feedback during the meeting, ask members to submit them via email, that way everyone gets the opportunity to contribute, including those who could not make the meeting live.

Make sure all important announcements are made by emails, even if they had been made during the meetings.

Issue #4: Keeping tabs on your remote workers

Trying to get remote workers to accomplish assigned tasks, effectively, on time, and up to spec, can feel a lot like shouting into the wind because you don’t get to see them physically and monitor the work they claim to be doing. 

And for those who claim to be working, you’ll have no choice but to take their words for it, since you wouldn’t be able to track their progress. It’s even more difficult if their progress reports don’t say the things you want to hear.

How to deal with it?

Be very clear about what needs to be documented at every step of any given project, let them know the expectations or benchmarks they need to hit, and while you’re at it, if yours is a company that welcomes innovation and creativity let them know that too. Also let them know if you’re keen on having them log in the required hours or if you don’t give a hoot about hours and simply want to see a finished product.

If any team member contacts you about a certain emergency, or a difficult situation they’re in (perhaps their house got swept away by a hurricane or they lost a loved one) show empathy, let them know your thoughts are with them and ask if there’s anything you can do to help. Make a genuine effort to show that you’re concerned about them.

If you’re the type that is genuinely concerned about how many hours they spend doing work and how many they spend just idling away, have them install tracking software that records how much time they spend working as opposed to surfing the net looking at funny facebook videos and memes, depending on the software you use, some can even provide intermittent screenshots of their screen to show what projects they are working on in real time.

It also helps if you provide a qualitative way to show each remote worker’s contribution, how their efforts or lack of it, fits in the grand scheme of things.

Remote works offers many benefits both to employees and employers. However, along with multiple benefits, remote teams face number of unique challenges and miscommunication is one the biggest ones. Dealing with miscommunication issue is not easy but with the right tools and processes, you can minimize that issue starting from today.

The post Communication Issues in Remote Teams and How To Solve Them appeared first on Krisp.

Ever imagined what life would look like without the basic technologies that make it easy for us to accomplish our day to day tasks? Life without cars? Without electricity to power our homes and hospitals? You would agree with me that life would be a lot more stressful and it’ll be extremely difficult or even close to impossible to do some activities.

Well, much the same thing applies to apps for distributed teams. Some apps are so important, so relevant, that they can make or break such teams.

That said, some of these apps are not restricted to distributed teams alone. Time management tools like Toggl, for instance, will help you up your productivity game regardless of what type of company you are or what type of team you run. 

In this post, we are going to suggest 10 of the top apps for distributed teams that are an absolute need for smooth day-to-day running.

Trello

There is definitely a lot of decent project management and task management software out there in the market, but one thing that sets Trello apart from the competition is its simplicity, performance, and efficiency.

With Trello you get access to a digital dashboard where you can set up a team, create a project, (by setting up what is called a project card) define the scope and requirements of that project, put a “due date” on it and then assign it to a team member or wait for a team member to assign it to herself. 

Mind you, the team member doesn’t have to execute the project in isolation, they can take suggestions from, (and collaborate with) other team members since various users can comment, add useful links, files or visuals to the project card.

For Trello newcomers, being greeted with a back-breaking learning curve might be overwhelming. There’s good news though, you can get the hang of the most important parts of Trello in just a couple of minutes.

Krisp

If you’re looking to do anything that involves audio then you should probably check Krisp out. Be it recording a podcast or video, making or receiving audio conference calls or even video conference calls. One common thread that runs through all of these activities is noise.

And noise, my friends, is capable of annoying you and destroying your audio experience. Who wants to listen to a podcast filled with background noises? No one. Who wants to jump on a business call and hear dogs barking and trucks honking in the background for the whole length of the call? Not me.

And that’s where tools like Krisp come in.

When you’re taking a call in a noisy environment it uses AI technology to cancel the background noise making sure only your voice gets across to your receiver’s end and in the same vein it also cancels whatever noise is coming from your receiver’s end making sure no background noise gets to you. So it works both ways.

Krisp can integrate with all apps and that includes countless conference call apps (audio and video), screen recorders of all sorts. Long story short, any app that deals with audio can integrate with Krisp. 

10to8

This one is an easy-to-use amazing appointment scheduling app that can make the lives of remote teams much hassle-free and easier. 10to8 allows you to book appointments with all your frequently used and most trusted apps – including syncing the appointments in your calendar, paying for them online, and much more.

10to8 has integrations with over 500 cloud solutions, allowing both small and large remote teams to collaborate seamlessly. The app has a range of interesting features – you can make use of the handy chat that will show up right in your calendar for a quick talk. You can monitor the performance with the user-friendly dashboard and live reports.

Sounds good to know you can book and manage all your appointments in all your calendars from any device and at any time.

Dashlane

Have absolutely no doubts about it: Your password(s) can be stolen. I mean, if industry giants like Quora or Marriott hotels can suffer security breaches that allowed thieves to compromise the data of their users; then who’s to say you can’t? You could say “Well they are giants, I’m no giant, my business is just worth 100,000 USD.“ Well NEWSFLASH: there are thieves who are comfortable with stealing just 20000. 

Now with a distributed team, it goes without saying that your team members would need to know the password to access some company tools and data to enable them to execute various assigned tasks and projects. In keeping with that, you might be tempted to simply create a  password-protected spreadsheet and fill it with all of the necessary passwords and ship it out to your team members. But what if it gets into the wrong hands? There’s no telling the amount of havoc that your business can suffer.

And that’s where password managers like Dashlane come in, they help keep your password safe, automatically fill out forms and make it easier for your team members to log into the necessary tools. It comes with an “automatic password changer” functionality, and in a single click, you can update your passwords on multiple fronts.

Google Drive

Companies fail, or at best, lose a lot of money because of ineffective document management systems. And such losses are even more pronounced for companies with distributed teams, imagine being a remote worker on a distributed team, you’re located in Moscow, Russia and you can’t access a certain file or template and your colleague in Chicago can’t be reached because it’s 2 AM in the morning and they are probably asleep (who can blame them?)

For any distributed team to run smoothly, there must be easy access to files and documents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without fail. And that’s where tools like Google Drive come in.

Google Drive is a cloud-based storage and syncing tool that provides a fantastic free storage plan. It allows remote and distributed teams store files, documents, templates, spreadsheets and slide presentations.

And the most important part is that any member of the team can access such files anytime and from anywhere in the world. Multiple users can collaborate on a single document at the same time and all the files can be synced across multiple devices so you can access them on phones, tablets, laptops etc.

Zapier

If you’ve been in charge of any team long enough, you would know how difficult and time consuming it is to send an email to team members notifying them every time a sale is made, to pass documents across and ensure that everyone is up to date. This isn’t any less difficult when you’re dealing with a distributed team. 

Imagine how much time you’ll be able to save if these tasks can be successfully automated. Now that’s where workflow automation software like Zapier comes into the picture. 

With Zapier, the apps you rely on can talk to one another through personalized integrations known as zaps.

How do those work? Each zap tells your apps when and how they should pass data back and forth between one another, say you have a website where you use a webform to collect customer feedback, you can use a zap to automatically copy new submissions to a spreadsheet or make a zap that automatically sends email and chat notifications to each of your team members when you make a sale.

 And the good news is, Zapier not only works for emails and spreadsheets, but it is also integrated with over 1000 apps, you save yourself the stress and make Zapier do all the heavy lifting and save you hours of tedious work.

World Time Buddy

Members of a distributed team often live far away from one another, often across various continents and time zones. And if you head a distributed team or you’re a member of one you’ll understand how difficult it is to schedule meetings at a time that works for everyone.

Mind you, this is not a headache that will go away anytime soon because as long as the team exists you’ll need to meet as a group every now and again.

World Time Buddy came into the picture to make your life a lot easier, all you need to do is simply enter the locations of all your team members and drag the slider to find the most suitable time to meet.

The downside to Time Buddy is that its free version only allows you to organize meetings within 4 different time zones (locations). If you try to add a 5th location the site prompts you to make room by deleting one of the 4 you added earlier, or click to see pricing and select a subscription plan that works best for you.

Zoom

Well now that World Time Buddy has helped you to hold down a time that works for all your team members, the next question is: how do you plan to hold such meetings, is it going to be audio-only? Or audio-visual? How would you prevent frustrating technical glitches such as no sound or buffering video which are commonplace in conference calls today?

To answer that question you’ll need Zoom, the only video conferencing tool in the marketplace today that allows totally glitch-free video conference calls. 

Zoom is very simple to use, it allows individual members to join meetings from their personal computers (desktop or laptop) or mobile devices. With a single touch, all the team members can see one another face-to-face. Doubting the quality of the video? Well, Zoom provides the highest quality video and audio when compared to its competitors. It brings a distributed team together making it feel as though they’re all in the same room as the meeting progresses.

Toggl

We all suck at time management, or who doesn’t? And this is a problem that’s even more pronounced when teams are geographically distributed since there’s hardly anyone to monitor who does what, when or how. Team members can easily give in to procrastination and decide to watch just one more episode of (insert name) on Netflix thereby jeopardizing the progress of a project, and by extension the company.

But Toggl seems to have a solution to that.

Toggl is one of the best cloud-based time tracking apps on the market today and although it’s web-based they have apps that allow you to access them on your windows, iOS and Android devices and your content syncs across all platforms in real time.

With Toggl any member of a distributed group can better schedule and conduct their activities and by the end of the day, week or month they can analyze their time spent thereby identifying where they wasted time and jeopardized their productivity.

Slack

When email threads include a lot of team members with each person chiming in, a back and forth ensues, and the thread becomes pretty confusing very fast. In situations like that, it is easy to lose track of important information simply because of the sheer volume of emails you’re receiving.

Most workers also find it difficult to keep up when they receive internal and external–messages from outside the company– emails in the same inbox and this often makes it difficult to separate internal emails that relate to particular project from external ones (not to mention that a lot of emails fall through the cracks).

To solve this issue, most teams turn to Slack.

Slack is one of the best communication tools in the market today, and it especially packs a lot of power for distributed teams. At the basic level, it’s just a messaging app for teams, and it often promises to keep you and your team (that includes your distributed teams) away from often lengthy and mostly confusing email threads which are known to be unproductive.

With slack you don’t need to email one another for anything internally related, you can simply form a small group and have direct messages featuring one-on-one conversations on specific topics or client problems. And if there’s a particular topic that a lot of people are interested in you can set up a channel –a topic-specific chat room– and have people contribute.

Hello Sign

Whether you’re just starting out as a team or you’ve been together for some time, there’ll be some transactions that will require you or other members to sign the dotted line somewhere. It could be a contract or a letter or just about anything. 

HelloSign makes it easy for you to do that from wherever you are in the world. And unlike other online signing tools, HelloSIgn guarantees your top security.

Wrapping Up

In this day and age, it is pretty clear that for a distributed team to thrive successfully it has to take advantage of the internet and productivity apps such as but not limited to the ones we’ve listed in this post. For instance, I know of no other way, for such a team to have a face-to-face meeting except by using video conferencing apps like Zoom. So a good number of these apps for distributed teams are indispensable.  

The post Here Are the Best Tools & Apps for Distributed Teams appeared first on Krisp.

Most Mac users grossly under-utilize their devices, they hardly use it to its fullest capacity. Think of it this way, imagine someone buying a car but using it as though it were a bicycle. Just because they don’t know any better?

That’s nothing short of heartbreaking and you certainly can feel yourself wanting to tell them how much they are missing right? That’s exactly what this post is setting out to do.

This post is relevant to just about anyone who uses a Mac and wants to get more done in less time, ranging from businesses that use the Mac for their day-to-day activities to governmental agencies that buy Mac computers in bulk to distribute among their staff and the individuals who choose to use theirs privately.

The post seeks to cover some smart hacks, pretty useful tips, and neat tricks that help to improve productivity while you use a Mac.

Here are 12 Mac hacks to help you get ahead: 

[demo]

1. BLOCK OUT NOISE

Conference calls and especially video conferencing have become an absolute must in today’s business world and those who are not jumping on the bandwagon are certainly going to be left behind and the consequences on their bottom line are going to be dire.

Video conferencing on the Mac might be somewhat problematic if you’re making a call from a reasonably noisy environment, and it’s usually not the fault of your Mac. One app that can help straighten things out and prevent the noise from disturbing your conversation is Krisp.

Krisp filters your audio both ways making sure no noise gets to your ears on your side or the ears of your callers at the other end of the call.

To use Krisp, simply download the free Krisp app and select it as your microphone when making your conference calls.

2. TROUBLESHOOT YOUR GRANDMA’S COMPUTER ISSUES REMOTELY

Have you ever tried to explain a technical problem to a non-technical person over the phone? I kid you not, it’s usually a long, difficult and frustrating conversation.

We all have that close relative or friend who is non-tech savvy but needs help with fixing their computer issues from time to time. 

Well, guess what? Rather than having such frustrating calls with your grandma or any other close relative for that matter, wouldn’t it be lovely and so much easier to troubleshoot if you could remotely access their screen and control their Mac from wherever you are in the world? (even if you were vacationing in faraway Thailand?) It turns out, there’s a smart hack for that as long as you’re both connected to the internet. 

Here’s how:

Launch “screen sharing” on your Mac, you can find it with Spotlight then enter your Grandma’s Apple ID, if you don’t know it, have her look it up from the iCloud pane of System Preferences. 

She’ll receive a notification asking her to grant you permission to view her screen once she grants it you’re in.

If it still doesn’t work, make sure she enables screen sharing in the sharing pane of System Preferences.

3. USE YOUR MAC TO SEND AND RECEIVE SMS 

“Why would I need to send text messages on my Mac?”

You might wonder. And that’s a valid question. Well for starters, you won’t have to switch between multiple devices since it’s much easier to do all your work from your Mac, and besides, typing is faster and more accurate on a computer than on a smartphone, and texting on your Mac helps to save your phone battery. So what’s there to hate? 

Now that you know what you stand to gain, let’s answer the next question which is, how do I send and receive text messages on my Mac. 

Well, first you have to have an iPhone and it has to be running at least iOS 8.1. Once you have that covered simply toggle on the Text message Forwarding option under settings under messaging on your iPhone. There you have it, simple as ABC.

If it doesn’t work, check again to make sure you’re signed into the same iMessage account both on your Mac and your iPhone or other iOS devices.

4. HAVE DIALOGUES WITH YOUR MAC

Yes, you read that correctly you can talk to your Mac and have it respond to you.

This isn’t completely new, those of you that have been using the Mac from way back know that you could talk to it and have it talk back through dictation.

But you’ll all agree with me that Siri’s arrival on the scene completely redefined the art of talking to computers and things improved very significantly.

Here’s how to get it started:

Simply press the command key and the space key for a couple of seconds or click the Siri button from your Menu Bar and you’ll have good old Siri helping to make your work easier and faster on the Mac.

If you have a newer version of the Mac you can summon Siri by simply saying ‘Hey Siri’

And once Siri is up you can ask it to do all manner of things for you, below are a few of them: 

Hey Siri

• “Search the net for images of (fill in whatever you want)”
• “How much free space do I have on my Mac”
• “Find tweets from (insert name)”
• “Show me all the files I shared with (insert name) last month”
• And just in case you were wondering, you can also ask Siri, “What can you do?”

5. RECORD SCREENS PRETTY EASILY

Here’s another Mac productivity hack.

Screen recording has become quite popular these days because it’s very helpful, it makes life very easy.

You no longer have to send a 5-paragraph description of the bugs you encountered while using an iOS app, you can simply record your screen showing the bugs and send the recorded to the concerned developer and that’s just one out of the countless beneficial ways to use screen recording.

How can you record the screen of any of your iOS device from your Mac? Easy. Simply connect your iOS device to your Mac through its USB cable then click QuickTime player from your Mac’s launch pad.

 At the top of your screen click File, and select New Movie recording from the dropdown menu, by default QuickTime will load your Mac’s webcam so be sure to click the drop-down menu next to the record button and choose your connected iOS device as the camera source, in the process, you can also choose which speaker you would like to record the audio from, and you’re good to go.

6. SEND HUMONGOUS FILES OVER EMAIL

More than 30% of the entire population of the world uses email, that’s about 3billion people. In fact, emails have revolutionized the way businesses and individuals communicate, so much so that if your business doesn’t use email in today’s world you’re setting it up for failure.

Now aside from written text, email also allows users to send attachments in form of files of various formats and we sometimes get the urge to send huge chunks of really important files. 

Most email providers will naturally reject that because large files overload the email servers and as such the email might not get through and even if it gets through it might jam up the recipients inbox and that’s not a good thing if you’re a business trying to make an impression on a prospective customer.

But here’s the good news, with your Mac and with Yosemite OS and any other recent OS, you can now email files as large as 5GB on Apple’s mail app or the webmail version at icloud.com. The way it works is that the file gets uploaded to iCloud and your recipient receives an email carrying a download link to that file, such links usually expires after 90 days.

7. UP YOUR PRIVACY GAME ON SAFARI

In the past, or at least before the Yosemite OS was released, if you were browsing the internet with the Safari and you wanted to delete caches and history you had to delete everything, there’s no option for clearing data from say, yesterday or today. To delete one, you simply had to delete everything. Both the useful, non-confidential ones that you need, and the confidential ones that you have to protect from prying eyes. 

 And that’s bad news removing caches means slower browsing since caching improves and speeds up browsing.

The release of Yosemite provided a lot more wiggle room, you can now filter which data to clear, whether it’s from 1 hour ago or 1 day or a week ago. 

8. CONVERT BETWEEN VARIOUS UNITS IN SPOTLIGHT 

Older Mac operating systems supported calculations, so you could easily do basic calculations in Spotlight and when the new OS High Sierra was released, it came with an added functionality, that allows people to compute conversions between various units say from gallons to liters and vice versa.

All you need do is type in the number you intend to convert and its current unit and then the new unit you want it converted to and spotlight will provide the converted form.

And if you’re not sure yet what unit you’re looking to convert to you can simply type in your number and the old unit and then wait for spotlight to suggest suitable units.

9. CREATE YOUR OWN KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

We all love shortcuts because they help save time and make our work smoother, easier and faster. But one really nice thing about the Mac is that you’re not only restricted to the shortcuts that were pre-programmed into your device you can also create new ones that are tailored to your specific needs. 

To create your own unique shortcut, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Keyboard, then click Shortcuts. Then go ahead and click the + button to add a new shortcut. Click the drop-down list to select which app you’d like to apply the shortcut to and while typing in the name of the menu command, be sure to know and type in the exact name including any characters such as ellipses or any other punctuation.

To finish up, press the key combination that you would like to use as a keyboard shortcut, then click Add. And you’re good to go with this Mac productivity trick. 

10. BLOCK OUT DISTRACTIONS

You woke up early and went out for your early morning run, got back home, took a shower, a light breakfast and you’re refreshed and ready to take the day on.

But the moment you open your Mac this or that notification begins to pop in and before you realize what’s going on, you’ve blown a solid 2 hours attending to all manner of notifications. That’s 2 hours of your most productive time spent on things that could wait.

If you don’t want that to be a regular thing with you, the best thing is to have your Mac put itself in Do Not Disturb mode between morning and lunch every day. That way whenever you set about your work, you wouldn’t get distracted by an army of notifications each jostling for your attention while you’re trying to get meaningful work done.

To do this, go to System Preferences > Notifications.

11. STOP PROGRAMS FROM AUTOMATICALLY RUNNING ON STARTUP

Another nifty Mac productivity trick. When you turn on your Mac, it doesn’t just start off and sit until you to give it further instructions, it actually starts a bunch of apps in the background and these apps slow down your boot time very significantly. Funny thing is: Most of these apps are usually unused.

If you turn off these apps you will be able to save yourself a lot of time because your device will spend less time booting.

To achieve this, head over to System Preferences and select Users & Groups and then choose the Login items tab, once you’re there simply uncheck all the apps that don’t need to start when the computer boots.

12. SIGN PDFS RIGHT FROM YOUR MAC 

There’s hardly any contract in existence today that doesn’t require you to sign above the dotted line at some point.

Even in this era of emails and PDFs things haven’t changed, people are still required to print out the PDFs, sign it, scan it and then send it back in. But with your Mac you don’t have to go through all that stress you can sign it right in the mail.

Simply drag and drop a PDF into the email you want to send, hover your mouse at the top right corner to reveal a button, and then click it to reveal an option for signing documents, you can either sign by holding a signed paper up to your Mac’s webcam and have your signature neatly captured or sign by scribbling on the trackpad.

WRAPPING UP

We have covered a decent number of Mac productivity hacks and tricks, some to preserve your privacy, others to make your work easier, smoother and faster. And even some more to reduce distractions and block out noise.

Are there any other pretty neat Mac productivity tricks that you know of? Drop us a tweet. 

The post Top Mac Productivity Hacks, Tips and Tricks appeared first on Krisp.

There’s an obvious limit to what they can do in terms of eliminating distracting noises, they are known to work best with continuous noise: noise that is constant, predictive and repetitive. 

Anything aside from that and you might as well save your money and get yourself a couple of cheap earplugs and a standard headphone.

In this post, I’ll answer the question of who really needs noise cancelling headphones. I’ll also cover some of the most common disadvantages of noise cancelling headphones, and some situations where they won’t even work at all and some alternatives you can use in those situations.  

Who needs noise cancelling headphones?

Do you even need noise cancelling headphones? That’s the first question you need to answer before you decide whether or not you want to shell out the cold hard cash required to get one.

Let’s screen people out first, if you want to get a pair just because you’re curious and would like to have a feel for what noise cancelling headphones might sound like when you wear them in a noisy environment then you don’t actually need to buy one, simply go to a store and try on one of the test samples on display.

Okay, with mere curiosity out of the way, let’s look to more genuine reasons. 

If your own reason for wanting to buy these headphones is that: you get annoyed by unplanned and unpredictable high frequency noises like sudden shrieks of laughter, people talking loud, automobiles or trains honking and noisy co-workers then these headphones might not work for you, and you’d be better off with a pair of inexpensive earplugs or noise isolating earbuds 

So who actually needs these headphones?

To get a clear idea of those who will benefit most from this type of headphones we’ll need to understand the type of noises that these headphones are capable of eliminating.

There are roughly three types of noises viz:

CONTINUOUS NOISE

Continuous noise is usually just that, continuous, it’s constant and predictable and continues to run without stopping. An example of these are the heating and ventilation systems that keep humming non-stop or the continuous drone of an aircraft engine for the whole duration of a flight.

If you are constantly exposed to this kind of noise for extended periods at a time then you’re one of those people who need these headphones and it might be a good idea to consider getting noise cancelling headphones equipped with an active noise cancellation circuitry. 

INTERMITTENT NOISE

These are usually a mix of sometimes quiet and sometimes noisy periods. And they occur at irregular intervals. Examples of these are the noise from factory machinery that operates in cycles or sounds of a train passing by.

If you’re constantly exposed to this kind of noise then these headphones might help muffle the noise but aside that they won’t be able to change much for you. 

IMPULSIVE NOISE

Impulsive noises usually come in sudden and very high pitched short blasts. The noise from these unexpected blasts usually dissipates as fast as it came, and as such you only hear them for a split second and then it’s gone. Examples of this noise are blasts from various construction sites. 

If you work in this kind of environment, these headphones will not help you much and what you need are some effective earplugs.

Now that we know what kind of noise can be eliminated by the headphones, let’s talk about some situations where they won’t work.

What are some common disadvantages of noise cancelling headphones?

Cost

Noise cancelling headphones are not like your standard everyday headphones, the standard headphones simply transmit sound signals from your audio device to your ear cups and eventually to your ears and that’s all.

 The noise cancelling headphones do that too, but in addition, they are equipped with the technology to cancel, or at the very least, suppress background noise (noise from your surroundings).

This extra functionality comes at an additional fee, and that’s why noise cancelling headphones are a lot more expensive than the standard headphones.

Decent noise cancelling headphones on the market today will set you back by about $300 and unfortunately, not everyone can afford that.

Battery life

Another problem with these types of headphones is that they run on batteries.

 And as I pointed out earlier, these headphones are equipped with a technology that allows them to listen to background noises from the surroundings and then generate an anti-noise signal that cancels such noises.

But to power this technology, the headphones require a battery of their own, these batteries can either be disposable or rechargeable and they’re known to have a short span of uptime. 

With a full charge, most batteries will last for about 20hours and for some noise cancelling headphones, once the battery is flat the headphones die completely, you won’t even be able to use it as a normal headphone and that’s bad news.

Audio quality

Yes, noise cancelling headphones help to eliminate background noise, but at what expense? 

A lot of users have complained that it is usually a give-and-take game, the headphones give you audio devoid of distracting noises but in exchange, it takes away audio quality, so much so, that some have even suggested that they deliver audio quality that pales in comparison to that of a standard headphone that is within the same price range.

The active noise cancellation circuitry is best only at canceling repetitive, predictable sounds such as a constant noise from an aircraft engine. Noise cancelling headphones won’t help much if you’re in an environment that is rich with intermittent noise like unplanned, sudden shrieks of laughter every once in a while.

They have also been reported to be better at cancelling noises found in the midrange to lower frequencies rather than those at a higher frequency. 

Comfort

Noise cancelling headphones can be a little less comfortable than standard headphones, how? Well, some are quite heavier because they clearly contain a lot more, others are a little too tight around the ears because they were designed to achieve a good seal (or a noise-tight seal, if you want) with the ears in order to block out external noise and prevent noise leakage from the headphones. The earpads on some others can start to feel hot to the ears on prolonged use.

Some people have complained that the active noise cancellation functionality produces a non-stop hissing sound that they find disconcerting, others have said when they wear noise cancelling headphones they feel as though their inner ear is under pressure.

So I suppose it’s safe to say that some just aren’t made for noise-cancelling headphones.

Some situations, where noise cancelling headphones will not work

PODCAST

Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular these days, Apple alone, features over 500,000 active podcasts, broadcasting content in more than 100 languages.

But regardless of how many podcasts there are in the world, let’s be honest here, would you listen to a podcast that has distracting noises in the background? No? I thought so too. I wouldn’t bother listening myself, in fact, nothing encourages me to hit the unsubscribe button more than the bad sound quality and unpleasant audio noises of a podcast.

Noise cancelling headphones are fantastic, but let me ask you a question. As a podcaster can you use them while recording, to rid your podcast of those characteristic noises like constant hisses, buzzings, and hummings that some podcasts are known for? NO. 

To do that, you would need something else. something that has the ability to separate noise from your audio as it goes into your microphone. Something like the artificial intelligence-powered noise cancelling app called Krisp 

How do you do that? 

Well, before I tell you how you can get Krisp to do your bidding, here’s a short LinkedIn video of how it works by LinkedIn expert Isaac Anderson.

Now let’s get to it.

Download and install Krisp and then choose Krisp as your microphone while you record.

SCREEN RECORDING

A Deloitte survey of about 2000 users in the U.S reveals that a whopping 91% of them simply agree to “terms and conditions” documents without reading through.

When was the last time you patiently read through a 14-page long  “terms and conditions” document of an online tool before checking the “I have read the terms…” box and clicking “I AGREE”? Not many times, right? You are not alone, I hardly read it too, and as it turns out, the vast majority of people never read it either. Why? It’s simply too long and too jargon-heavy and people have a pretty short attention span.

The same thing happens when people are asked to read a jargon-heavy product description or just about any other unappealing text. They hardly read it.

So what do you do to help as a business? Do you onboard new customers by sending them pages upon pages describing what you want them to do, or do you simply get a screen recording app like Loom, record your screen and send the recorded video to your customers?

Going by the stats above you would agree that going the video route would turn out to be more beneficial to your customers and by extension your bottom line. But there’s a common problem with screen recording apps, although most of them do a fantastic job with the video quality the audio is usually sub-par. 

How do you solve that problem, again your noise cancelling headphones are powerless here and you’ll have to turn to an app like Krisp

Once you download Loom and Krisp, all you need to do is open up Loom and as you’re about to start recording you’ll find a menu bar on the right that reads “Microphone source” select Krisp as the Microphone and you’re good to go.

CUSTOMER SERVICE CALL CENTER

Customer Service Representative: Hi thanks for calling (insert name of company), we aim to provide you with the best energy… this is Steve speaking, how may I help you today?

Mr. James: (obviously angry, cuts him short and yells). You folks must have been defrauding me all this while, and I only discovered because I got overcharged this past month. I left the country for the whole month, emptied the refrigerator and turned off all the appliances yet I still got charged a $200 bill. How do you explain that?

Customer Service Representative: May I have your account number so I can run some checks on our end?

Mr. James: Sure it’s xx-xx-xx-xx and I hope a get a refund for this month and a re-calculated bill for the past couple of months too. 

Some call centers handle nearly 200,000 calls a day, so imagine 200,000 different conversations like the one above or even a different one every day, and you’ll begin to get an idea of how much noise call centers are capable of generating every minute of every hour that they are open (and some call centers are open 24/7).

Again noise cancelling headphones might help a little, but it definitely won’t stop the noise from getting across to your customers, So what to do? Download Krisp for free and let it filter out the noise from your voice before it gets to your customer.

REMOTE WORKERS 

The world is gradually going remote, 80% to 90% of the US workforce says they would like to telework at least part-time, and 36% said they would choose it over a pay raise.

However, working remotely is not as glamorous as it looks on the outside, especially if you’re a parent with little kids and you happen to be working from home, you will have to put up with a lot of noise, your dog is barking, your twins are screaming and playing in the bath or your two-year-old is making a fuss over her toys. These are noises that will definitely affect your conference calls with clients(if you’re a solo freelancer) or with other team members if you’re part of a remote team.

Headphones will not help much and again Krisp is your best bet as demonstrated in this YouTube video. It was featured on Appsumo and became Product of the Day on Product Hunt!

CONCLUSION

Noise cancelling headphones used alone can only do so much, thus they are best used in conjunction with other recording and noise cancellation apps.

The post Why Noise Cancelling Headphones Aren’t Enough? appeared first on Krisp.

In-ear earphones are the most commonly used ear accessories in the world, this is because they are extremely lightweight and portable, and having them in your pocket is about as heavy as having a coin in your pocket.

One pretty common example of in-ear headphones are the white “earpods” that you find in the box when you buy a new iPhone.

In this post, we’ll list some of the best in-ear noise cancelling headphones (in no particular order) and we’ll say a few things about each of them.

BOSE QUIETCOMFORT 20

The Bose QC20 in-ear noise cancelling headphones have been around for quite some time now. It prides itself as being one of the best in the market.

And because Bose has made a name for itself in the industry people naturally seek out Bose products whenever they want to buy audio equipment, thus it’s safe to say the Bose QC20s are the most popular noise cancelling earphones among people today.

Its active noise cancellation is best in class, they produce fantastic audio quality.

On top of that, the earphones are comfortable and can be worn for an extended period of time.

It comes with a portable carrying case that protects it from wear and scratches.

In case you were wondering, its active noise cancellation runs on a lithium battery that provides about 16 hours of battery life when fully charged.

BOSE QUIET CONTROL 30 WIRELESS

First off, these are a bit pricey, so if you’re looking for something that costs a lot less, this isn’t for you.

In terms of noise cancellation, the QC30 is sub-par to the Bose QC20 but to offset that, QC30 comes with Bluetooth wireless technology (the QC20 is not wireless) and it’s sweat and moisture resistant making it suitable to be used while exercising, working out or playing sports.

CNET calls it “the ultimate neckband-style Bluetooth headphone. A style that looks like a horseshoe draped around the back of a person’s neck.”

BANG & OLUFSEN H3S ANC

If you’re looking for superb audio quality and you don’t mind shelling out cold hard cash to get it you probably should give this a try.

On top of its fantastic sound reproduction, BANG & OLUFSEN H3S ANC has top of the line active noise cancellation technology. 

When fully charged, it can support up to 20 hours non stop audio entertainment with noise cancellation enabled. 

Think your ears are a bit too big or small? Not to worry, you’re covered, the earphones come with 5 different ear tips and you can try each one on until you get a perfect fit.

Concerned that sounds from your audio might escape and distract people around you? Relax… these earphones allow zero leakages.

And just in case you were wondering, it comes with a case and a flight adapter that lets you enjoy inflight entertainment.

AUDIO TECHNICA ATH-ANC23 QUIETPOINT

If you’re looking for a pretty decent earphone that wouldn’t drill that much of a hole in your pocket then you might want to consider the Audio Technica ATH-ANC23 Quietpoint. 

It has a pretty fantastic active noise cancellation system, and produces well-detailed sounds.

If you are the type that goes on long commutes that require you to have your earphones plugged in for an extended period of time, this earphone has you covered, it’s very comfortable and it fits and seals well into your ears.

AKG K391 NC

The AKG K391-NC are a pretty decent set of in-ear earphones, they pride themselves with superb audio reproduction and top of the line noise isolation.

If you’re given to long commutes, you’ll enjoy their active noise cancellation functionality, and with their excellent noise leakage performance, it’s quite unlikely that while listening to your audio entertainment, the sound will leak out and disturb people around you.

The earphones are as comfortable as one might expect and they come with 3 different sizes of sleeves just in case your ear canals are a bit small.

They are also pretty stable in the ears they fit well into the ear canal thus allowing you to engage in moderate physical activities without them falling.

In terms of storage, they come with a soft fabric pouch that protects them from getting scratched or damaged.

When fully charged, the AKG K391-NC can provide more than 30 hours of audio playback with the active noise cancellation enabled, thus it’s suitable for a perfect weekend getaway.

COWIN HE8D

If you’re looking for a noise-canceling earphone that’s wireless and lightweight and that produces excellent sound quality but you don’t want to spend a lot of money, you might want to look up the Cowin HE8D. 

One pretty neat feature that sets this earphone apart from its competition is that you can charge it with your android phone.

How so? It comes with a Micro-USB connector that you can plug into your Android phone and this allows you to charge your earphone battery using your android phone battery

“Why would I need to do that?” You might wonder.  Well, circumstances might put you in a place where there’s no power source anywhere close, yet you desperately need to use your earphones.

And when you get out of that circumstance, there’s the regular USB port with which you can charge from a power source.

PHIATON BT100 NC

This is a wireless in-ear earphone that provides you with decent active noise cancellation and an excellent sound reproduction quality.

It’s sweat and moisture resistant, making it best suited for when you’re in the gym working out or exercising.

Rather than a headband, it has one of those neckbands (collars) that you can drape over your neck.

The collar contains control buttons for answering or ending calls; or pausing, playing and switching to the next or previous tracks.

When fully charged the battery can last about 8 to 12 hours.

BONUS

Since some of these in-ear models have sub-par noise cancellation, it might be a good idea to download Krisp, a free app that helps remove background noise when you call.

Use Krisp with your earphones and watch as your noise cancellation game goes from beginner to grandmaster status, give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

[demo-new]

Read next:

10 Best Call Center Headsets in 2021

How to Clean Your Headphones 

The post 7 In-Ear Noise Cancelling Headphones or Earphones appeared first on Krisp.

Let’s look at the stats together. According to 2019 numbers, about 103 million people in America listen to podcasts every week.

Another survey, reveals that 21% of all podcast listeners, listen to not one, not two, not three but four different podcasts per week while 22% listen to, at least three podcasts per week.

[demo]

Is that going to change anytime soon? Highly unlikely, as tech giant Apple, according to Variety, boasts of featuring more than 500,000 active podcasts, with content in more than 100 languages.

And that’s just for Apple alone, if you add other sources like Android and Google you’ll be looking at a big, fat, juicy 750,000 active podcasts. And the number keeps climbing every day.

Now what exactly is a podcast and why should you care?

So what is a podcast? Well, you can think of it like episodes of a radio program only this time around it’s so much clearer and so much better. Radio programs let you listen only when the radio station decides to air it (usually once a week). A podcast grants you the flexibility to listen to its shows at any time of your convenience.

The word podcast was first used by the writer Ben Hammersley in a 2004 Guardian newspaper article, he borrowed the word pod from the then Apple’s iPod and the word cast from radio broadcasting and thus the new word podcast was born.

And just in case you were wondering, “are podcasts restricted to Apple products alone?” No, they are not.

To me, the best podcasts are the ones where the guests are willing to share deep insights into their personal lives, especially their failures. It’s also interesting to know about the road they took to it, how they got out of it, and how you (the listener) can avoid ever going down that route.

Below are some of the top noise pollution podcasts in the podcasting space, you can listen to them at the gym, while commuting, doing the laundry, dishes or just about any chore you choose.

And if you need noise cancelling headphones to start listening to noise pollution podcasts, we have a great selection of on-ear noise cancelling headphones here. 

ASHES ASHES

This podcast features, for the most part, systemic issues, cracks in civilization, the collapse of the environment and according to the hosts, if we get unlucky, the beginning of the end, of the world. 

Not every episode of this podcast is about Noise pollution, but from time to time they speak about issues that are tied to noise and its effect on our immediate environment.

In one such episode, they spoke to Bernie Krause, a former musician and the founding father of the science of soundscape ecology. Krause in the ’60s discovered how much joy he could derive from listening to and recording wild natural soundscape so much so that he decided to spend the rest of his life doing it. And it worked out well for him as he hasn’t looked back since then.

In this episode, they discuss among other things how our world organizes itself and maintains a healthy balance in large part through sound. And how “our noise disrupts these delicate systems, breaks down ecosystems, and drives species into confusion, disarray, and death.”

SOUND MATTERS

This podcast is sponsored by Bang & Olufsen, a high-end consumer electronics company that produces audio products and a host of other gadgets.

The Sound Matters podcast series provide listeners with the opportunity to look at, and most importantly, listen to the sounds of the world around us. 

Aside the sounds, and depending on the topic for each episode, the host Tim Hinman also speaks to celebs like David Lynch, a legendary artist and filmmaker  to chat about the “infinite dynamism of sound, creativity, and meditation”

Or other not-so-popular guests like Jo Milne, who was born deaf and had remained deaf until she turned 40 years old and had cochlear implants. 

To sum up, this podcast allows you to close your eyes and get the feeling that you are being teleported to another part of the world entirely. It also brings you closer to the experiences that others like Milne, went through and such closeness allows you to appreciate their struggles even more.

It turns out that their content is pretty high quality and a lot of people like them because Sound Matters won an award in its category at the British podcast awards in 2017.

TMSOFT’S WHITE NOISE SLEEP SOUNDS

This is a podcast that brings you white noise from a very wide variety of sources, from the sounds of ocean waves or an evening lake, to that of a gentle waterfall, to that of blowing winds, whatever the noise, TMSOFT has you covered as it boasts of a lot of episodes of different soothing noises that are at least 1-hour long each.

The human brain is not accustomed to being in complete silence, and that’s why even while we are asleep, our brains do not stop receiving and processing sound signals, our brain cannot cope with a lack of sensory input.

And that’s why if you fall asleep in an environment that is too quiet, any unwanted noise (especially if it wasn’t there before) no matter how seemingly silent, like a sudden burst in AC noise can wake you up.  

Now, that’s where white noise comes in. If you had slept while some white noise was playing in the background, that sudden AC noise wouldn’t have interrupted your sleep.

 What do you stand to gain from white noise?

• If you’re suffering from tinnitus, you can mask the ringing in your ears with some soothing white noise.
• It definitely helps you sleep better and protects you from unwanted sounds that might interrupt your sleep. 
• White noise has also been found to help in soothing crying babies.
• It helps you to relax, de-stress and unwind after a long stressful day.
• It has also been found to help in soothing mild headaches.

EYES ON CONSERVATION

The Eyes on Conservation podcast is one that features engaging conversations about wildlife conservation issues. 

And speaking of wildlife, it turns out that noise doesn’t only affect marine animals, it affects land animals as well, and this is the crux of the “Phantom road” episode of this podcast.  

This episode is quite interesting . It follows a group of Boise State University scientists who have been studying the effects of noise pollution on wildlife for a number of years. The team is led by Dr. Jesse Barber, a Professor of Sensory ecology, animal behavior and conservation biology.

And what question do they hope to answer?

It’s a straightforward one, does noise pollution affect the population of songbirds in an area?

To answer this, they set up what they call a Phantom Road site. They picked a location of interest and attached loudspeakers to a number of trees at that location. Next, they played pre-recorded road noises through the speakers during fall songbird migration. Then they waited and recorded their findings.

ALL EARS AT CHILD’S VOICE: A HEARING LOSS PODCAST

The podcast was started by Child’s Voice, a listening and spoken language program for children suffering from hearing loss. 

Among other things, this podcast was set up in a bid to connect parents of children with hearing loss to the professionals who can serve them.

They broadcast a lot of interesting topics. One such topic was covered in an episode with guest, Wendy Deters. What’s fascinating and amazing about her story is that she was raised by committed and dedicated parents, both of whom were deaf. 

She talks about her upbringing, some of the history of deaf education. She also tells how her parents lived with their cochlear implants, and the how their experiences have shaped her life and her career. 

TACKLING NOISE POLLUTION

This podcast is brought to you by the Open University. In fact, the material in this podcast forms part of the university’s course in Environmental Control and Public health.

So just as you might have guessed, the podcast shows how much havoc noise can wreak on the environment and on us the inhabitants of the environment.

There are episodes which show how to measure the amount of noise we are being exposed to. They also show how to reduce such noises significantly. Some episodes touch up on the strides that experts have been making at cutting down noise pollution from transportation.

HEARING AID & HEARING CARE PODCAST

This is not exactly one of noise pollution podcasts. It’s a podcast that aims to provide straightforward and honest advice about hearing loss and hearing aids. It also covers the types and different technologies that it supports, and the people that sell them.

Listen to this podcast and you’ll find episodes that look at how effective Hydrogen peroxide is in the ear drop solution or how some hearing aids now support Android.

OCEANS OF NOISE

Oceans of noise is a three-episode series brought to you by the science weekly podcast, a podcasting arm of The Guardian. It’s a once a week podcast that teaches you about the most recent discoveries and important debates in biology, physics, and chemistry. 

On the science weekly podcast, Ian Sample, Hannah Devlin, and Nicola Davis pick the brains of the scientists who are conducting beneficial research in their respective fields.  

Now to Oceans of Noise

Most people, myself included, grew up with the incorrect notion that life below the sea is quiet and serene. Who could blame us?

We could hardly hear anything when we were underwater. So we concluded that it had to be because it was quiet. Little did we know that it’s our ears that aren’t equipped to hear underwater sounds.

Life beneath the ocean is actually riddled with diverse sounds from different sea animals.

In one of the episodes, Dr. Lucille Chapuis, a marine biologist from the University of Exeter, throws some light on what makes water an effective medium for sound communication and how marine animals take advantage of this.

Other episodes reveal how human activities such as prospecting for oil and shipping are causing noise pollution in the oceans and how sea animals are suffering the consequences.

HOW TO SEARCH FOR NOISE POLLUTION PODCASTS

I know we’ve gone through quite a number of noise pollution podcasts, but if you’re still hungry for more, I’ve got you covered. I’m going to show you the easiest ways to find extremely valuable podcasts, without having to comb through page upon page of Google search engine responses.

My go-to place to search for podcasts is the iTunes store. It boasts of over 500,000 active podcasts in over 100 different languages there’s a very high likelihood that I’ll find what I’m looking for. 

So to start, click over to the podcast app and just type “noise” or “noise pollution” in the search bar.  Watch it respond with lists of podcasts that are super relevant to your needs. Another way is to scroll over to the “categories” section and browse by whatever category you want.

Stitcher is another site that boasts of over 100,000+ active podcasts, all you need do is go to their website and sign up (it’s completely free), once you’re done signing up, you can search through the category of your choice.

By the way, if you’re thinking of recording podcasts yourself, or if you’re already doing it, there’s a new handy app that can help you make sure it’s noiseless and professional.

It’s called Krisp and it will mute all the hissing microphone noises or any other background noise that might get in the way as you record. You can use it with any podcasting apps and even try having a series of your own noise pollution podcasts.

CONCLUSION

If you are one of those who, a few years ago, used to think podcasts are just a total waste of time, then perhaps you might want to reconsider, as podcasts are no longer what they used to be years ago. They’ve improved and become even more beneficial.

So much so that almost everyone is embracing it. Universities have podcasts, news giants like Guardian have podcasts, scientific journals have podcasts, even radio stations these days now have podcasts.

If you want to reconsider, a good place to start would be to listen to some of the noise pollution podcasts listed above. Let’s have your feedback in the comment section!

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