For about two years, my work setup has been a coffee shop, my apartment, and occasionally my parents’ house when I visit on weekends. I run a small consulting practice helping early-stage SaaS companies with onboarding flows, which means roughly 60% of my week is spent on video calls. The problem is that none of these environments are quiet. The coffee shop has an espresso machine that sounds like a jet engine. My apartment shares a wall with a couple who apparently own three dogs. And my parents live near a road that the city decided to repave for the entire month of October.
I tried everything before looking for a real solution. I bought a fancy directional microphone that I assumed would magically reject background noise. It did not. I tried positioning myself in corners, closing windows, putting blankets over my head like a wedding photographer from 1890. I’d open calls with the apologetic, “Sorry in advance for any background noise,” which is a sentence I came to hate hearing myself say. The breaking point came during a discovery call with a prospect I’d been chasing for four months. Halfway through, a leaf blower started up outside. I watched the client visibly wince through their webcam, and I knew I’d already lost the deal.
I found Krisp through a thread in a freelancer Slack community I lurk in. Someone was complaining about the same thing — kids in the background during sales calls — and three different people mentioned the same tool within ten minutes. I went to the website expecting the usual overpromising AI marketing language, but the demo on the landing page actually showed before-and-after audio samples I could play right there. That sold me more than any copy could. I started the free tier that night, mostly out of pure frustration after the leaf blower incident.
Setup took maybe four minutes. You install the app, it creates a virtual microphone and speaker, and then in Zoom or Google Meet you just select “Krisp Microphone” instead of your normal one. That’s basically it. My first real test was a standup with a client team the next morning, and I deliberately did it from the coffee shop to see what would happen. I sipped my drink, listened to the espresso machine go off twice, and nobody on the call mentioned a thing. Afterward I asked my main contact if the audio sounded okay, and she said it sounded like I was in a studio. I went back and read some more about it, including a couple of detailed krisp ai review posts, just to make sure I wasn’t imagining the difference.
The thing that surprised me was the two-way noise cancellation. I expected it to clean up my outgoing audio, sure, but it also strips noise from the people I’m talking to. One of my clients works from a co-working space that sounds like a school cafeteria, and now I can actually hear him without straining. That alone has changed how productive our calls feel. I’m not constantly asking him to repeat things.
These days I keep it running by default. Every call, every recording, every Loom video I make for clients. The noise cancellation works on basically anything — typing, dogs, traffic, that one neighbor who vacuums at strange hours. The transcription feature is decent too, though I find myself using it less than I thought I would. It’s accurate enough for note-taking, but it doesn’t handle speaker labels well when there are more than three people on a call, so I still end up cleaning up transcripts manually if I want to share them.
It’s not perfect. There’s a slight processing lag I can detect if I’m really paying attention, maybe 50 milliseconds, which most people would never notice but occasionally throws off my timing when I’m trying to interrupt someone politely. Also, the free tier has a weekly hour limit that I blew through in about two days once I started using it for everything, so I ended up on the paid plan. The pricing isn’t outrageous, around the cost of a couple of coffees per month, but I do wish the middle tier included more of the meeting assistant features without bumping you up to the business plan.
One annoying thing — when my laptop is on battery and CPU is under load, Krisp can spike usage enough that I notice my fan kicking on during longer calls. Not constantly, but enough that on a four-hour workshop day I’ll sometimes turn it off if I’m in a genuinely quiet room, just to save battery. There are still moments when I default back to the old way, like when I’m recording a podcast guest spot where the host wants raw audio without any AI processing in the chain. For those, I unplug everything and use my regular mic directly.
I’ve got a workshop series coming up next month where I’ll be presenting from three different locations across two weeks, including one from a hotel room near an airport. That’s going to be the real stress test. I’m also curious to try the meeting notes feature more seriously on a longer engagement, since I’ve been taking notes by hand like an animal and my wrist is starting to complain about it.
