For the past two years, I’ve been running a small consulting practice from a converted spare bedroom that shares a wall with my neighbor’s garage. Most days that’s fine. But my neighbor restores motorcycles as a hobby, and his schedule of grinding metal, revving engines, and blasting classic rock seems to align perfectly with my client calls. I’ve taken Zoom meetings with venture-backed founders while a 1978 Honda CB750 screamed to life six feet from my microphone. I’ve apologized so many times for “just one second while I close the window” that it became a running joke with one of my retainer clients.
Before I went looking for a real solution, my setup was a patchwork of half-measures. I had a Blue Yeti pointed at my mouth, a foam panel taped behind it, and a desperate routine of muting myself between every sentence. I tried Zoom’s built-in noise suppression on the “high” setting, which made my voice sound like I was talking through a tin can submerged in pudding. I tried Google Meet’s version, which was slightly better but still let drum solos punch through. I even priced out renting a coworking desk for two days a week, which would have cost me about $280 a month and added forty minutes of commute to days I needed for actual client work.
The breaking point came during a discovery call with a prospect I’d been chasing for three months. Midway through my pitch, the unmistakable sound of an angle grinder kicked in. The prospect literally laughed and said, “Are you okay over there?” I closed the laptop after the call and started searching. A thread on a freelancer subreddit pointed me toward a krisp ai review someone had written, comparing it against NVIDIA Broadcast and a few other options. I’d vaguely heard the name before but always assumed it was just another mediocre noise filter.
I signed up for Krisp that same afternoon. The landing page was straightforward, no aggressive countdown timers or fake testimonials, which I appreciated. There was a free tier with limited minutes per week, which felt like enough to test it without committing. Installation took maybe four minutes. It installs as a virtual microphone and speaker, so instead of choosing your actual hardware in Zoom or Meet, you select Krisp as the input and output device. That was the only configuration step.
My first real test was a recurring Tuesday call with a client who knows about my noise situation. I didn’t tell her I’d installed anything new. About ten minutes in, the motorcycle started. I winced and reached for the mute button, then stopped. She kept talking. I asked her if she could hear anything in the background. She said, “No, why? Did your dog bark?” That was the moment I actually leaned back in my chair.
What surprised me wasn’t that it removed the engine noise. I expected some level of suppression. What surprised me was that my voice still sounded like my voice. The Zoom and Meet filters always made me sound compressed and slightly robotic, like I was broadcasting from a 2008 call center. Krisp left the natural tone alone. The only thing it stripped was everything that wasn’t me talking.
I’ve been using it daily for about four months now. My typical week involves around fifteen to twenty calls, and I keep Krisp running on all of them by default. It also cleans up audio on the other end, which has been quieter benefit I didn’t anticipate. One of my clients takes calls from his kitchen, and his espresso machine used to interrupt every conversation. Now I just don’t hear it. The transcription feature is decent too, though I still prefer Otter for anything I need to actually reference later. Krisp’s meeting notes feel more like a summary than a true transcript, which is fine for quick recall but not for pulling exact quotes.
The limitations are real. On my older MacBook Air, running Krisp alongside Zoom and a browser with twenty tabs pushes the CPU hard enough that the fan kicks on. It’s not unusable, but I notice it. There’s also a weird thing where if someone on the call has very low audio quality to begin with, Krisp sometimes over-corrects and clips the start of their words. I’ve learned to turn it off briefly if I’m talking to someone calling from a car or a noisy cafe, because the algorithm seems to fight with already-bad input rather than improve it.
Pricing-wise, I’m on the Pro plan at $12 a month, billed annually. For someone whose income depends on sounding professional on calls, that math works out fine. The free tier caps you at 60 minutes a day, which I burned through by 11am most days. I do think the jump between tiers could be more granular, and the team plan pricing feels aimed at companies with a real budget rather than solo operators who occasionally collaborate with one or two contractors.
The one situation where I still default to the old approach is recording podcast interviews. For anything that’s going to be edited and published, I record locally with the raw mic and clean it up in post with iZotope, because I want full control over what gets removed. Krisp is great for live conversation but I don’t fully trust any real-time processing for archived audio.
Next month I’m planning to test the live translation feature on a call with a potential client based in São Paulo who’s more comfortable in Portuguese. I have no idea if it’ll actually be useful or just an interesting demo, but I’m curious.
