I am not kidding with the title. I can guarantee that your jaw will drop in
astonishment at least once during this video, if not multiple times. And yes,
the tool I'm going to be talking about and showing you is something that you personally
can benefit from, and really most people can, I think. What I'm talking about is Adobe's new AI
Speech Enhancer tool, and hold on, because it is more exciting than it might sound.
I assure you, you've not seen anything like this before. It's actually part of Adobe's new beta
project called Adobe Podcast, but don't let the podcast name fool you. It's good for so
much more than that. So instead of keeping you waiting, let's jump into the fun stuff,
and I'll show you some tests I did, and then afterwards I can go over more about the site.
So first I have some tests with some clips I specifically recorded for this
video. I recorded some samples with my webcam microphone, as well as my headset microphone,
both of which are not that great. And then also I'll add even more additional noise,
and see how the AI can handle that too. First up,
we'll do the webcam microphone test, and what I'll do is switch halfway between the audio clip.
They're all about 10 seconds long, so you can immediately hear the difference. One
quick thing to mention for all these tests, even though I'm using the microphone from
the headset and the webcam, the video, I'm actually using my phone to record, just so
it's a little bit higher quality. Anyway, let's hear the difference with the webcam microphone.
Alright, I am now doing this test with the webcam microphone. I don't have anything
planned to say. I'll probably do this for about 10 seconds,
and we'll see how the AI is able to handle improving this. So yeah, the result I would say
is actually amazing. You heard it yourself. There was a ton of echo that was gone.
I think there was even some ringing in the background that was also gone. I would say
it legitimately sounds like I was using an extremely high quality microphone,
like a condenser microphone or a close-up dynamic microphone or something. Now, I don't think I need
to explain why this might be useful to pretty much anyone, but we can go over more of that later.
Let's continue with the tests. This next test is also using the webcam microphone. However,
through the speakers while I was talking, I played some cityscape noises,
like cars on the road, that sort of thing. You'll hear what I mean,
and here's the difference. All right, this time I'm using the webcam.
However, I have some cityscape noises playing in the background. Should be a
pretty good stress test. I'm curious to see how the AI can deal with all this.
I would say that is also incredibly good. Now, you could still hear a little bit of
the noise in the background, but it was way lower and more like an ambient noise.
And I would say depending on where you are in the environment,
it might actually be more realistic. Like if you're on a city street, it might make sense
to have a little bit of low level noise of that kind in the background instead of it just being
purely voice. And just out of curiosity, I ran the enhanced audio through the enhancer again.
So we'll compare the regular enhanced to the double enhanced now. All right,
this time I'm using the webcam. However, I have some cityscape noises playing in the background.
Should be a pretty good stress test. I'm curious to see how the AI can deal with all this. So that
one did in fact remove the rest of the background noise completely, though I will say it started to
sound a little bit artificial, kind of like if you were to turn up the denoiser on a video too high.
That's sort of what it started to sound like. Though, I don't know if anyone would really
notice that if they weren't listening to it. Again though, I think probably having a little tiny bit
of the background noise in the previous one might actually sound more realistic. All right now for
this third test, also with the webcam, though this time I'm cranking the same noise up even higher.
So it's basically going to be drowning out my voice mostly, and we'll see how it does.
All right, this time with the webcam, I have the noises really cranked up and
I'm not going to talk so loudly. So this is an extreme stress test. I'm curious
to see if the AI is able to deal with all this. Now for that one to my ears
at least, it definitely started to sound pretty artificial. Maybe it's just because it's my own
voice, but it started to sound kind of like a robot voice, almost like one of those other
text to speech type things. That being said, all that noise was definitely lowered way down
to the point of being in the background despite starting out basically being louder than my voice.
So I would say depending on the situation, if the noise really is that bad, where the
audience wouldn't be able to really hear you at all in the first place,
I still think it'd be a better option than just leaving it as is. Okay,
so moving on to the next test, this is with my ModMic headset microphone.
This might be a more realistic situation for a lot of people who just have an average headset
microphone. There's not too much echo from this because it is pretty close,
but it still doesn't sound very good. So let's roll that comparison.
All right, so now we're using the ModMic microphone attached to my headset.
Not the best sounding microphone in the world, but it gets the job done and we can see how
the AI is able to deal with this one. I would say that is also an awesome result. It sounded
pretty much just like the webcam's result where it sounded like a legitimate high-quality microphone,
which should be really encouraging because this means even with a really bad room
microphone that has lots of echo, you can make videos that sound really high quality.
You don't have to worry about having a bad microphone anymore. All right,
so for these next tests, it's pretty much going to be a real world scenario because
I'm going to be testing it on some previous videos that I've actually made that would
have benefited from having this speech audio enhancer. The first example is a video I made
earlier this year where I was building a new computer and for part of the video,
I was standing at a table in my living room, which is not treated for sound.
It was extremely echoey, and even though I had a lavalier microphone, it still sounded really
bad. So I'll play the clips in three sections to compare. First is with the raw audio out of the
camera from the microphone, no enhancement. The second one is how I preprocessed it for
the video. I basically used a de-reverb plugin to try and remove as much reverb as possible.
It sounds better than the original, but still not that great,
my voice still sounded pretty hollow, you'll see what I mean. And then third,
I'll put the AI enhanced result. All right, so let's see what we got. We can start off
with the table. $25 Walmart folding table holding equipment worth many times that,
so that's going to be fun. So as you heard, the raw audio was really bad, tons of echo. In the
second one, I was able to remove a lot of the reverb, but it still sounded kind of weird and
hollow. But the AI was able to do way better than what I was able to do. It did sound a little bit
hollow, not as good as maybe some of the previous results we saw in other tests, but it was still
a night and day difference with their removal of the reverb and the speech enhancement in general.
Okay, now for the final test, we're going way back to the oldest video on my channel,
where I was talking about how YouTube was finally getting 1080p video. Yes,
it was ages ago. Here's just a few seconds of it to give you an idea.
So this week YouTube is going to be rolling out full HD 1080p resolution.
Yeah, it sounds super echoey, really noisy. And believe it or not,
that was already denoised. So I actually went into my archive and found the original
raw audio file so I could add the original audio to the comparison. And it sounds even
worse than what you just heard. So what I'll do is play the original raw audio, not denoised.
Then I'll play the denoised version that did end up on YouTube. Then I'll play the enhanced
version using the original raw audio and then the enhanced version using the denoised version
because there is a slight difference between the two that I wanted to illustrate. So let's see how
they compare. Now, if you don't know what 1080p means, there's 1920 pixels wide, 1080 pixels high.
The P stands for progressive scan, but just don't even worry about that. Yeah, that's
really good. I don't know how long it's going to take to buffer these videos when you're trying to
watch them. Again, incredible results, I would say. It basically was able to remove all that
reverb. Maybe a little bit was still left on the high end, but I'm really nitpicking, I think.
You might have noticed that the first enhanced clip had a little bit of noise in the background,
whereas the second one didn't. So it seems that if you have a crap ton of noise in the
original audio, it might benefit from doing some initial denoising,
at least a little bit, or I guess you could just denoise the enhanced version,
either order would probably work. But still pretty crazy. All right, so now that you've
seen how well it works, let's go talk about the site and the project and all that. Now,
if you go to podcast.adobe.com, don't worry that you see it says request
access. Even though the Adobe Podcast Suite is currently in closed beta,
you can access the speech enhancer tool right now without having to wait.
You just go to the site and scroll down to where it says AI-powered audio and hit
try it out. You will just need an Adobe account, but that's free. And how it
works is you just drag and drop an audio file on here and wait for it to process,
it's that simple. It says some clips can take 10 minutes or more,
and it does seem like more complicated files with lots of echo or noise take longer.
Then after it's finished, it'll let you listen to the before and after,
and you can also of course download the file. It also has a pretty generous file
size limit of up to one gigabyte, and it takes either MP3 or WAV files. And
it seems like the downloaded file it gives you is an uncompressed WAV, which is really nice.
Now, I do have access to the rest of the Podcast Suite, so we can take a look at that. Though
again, this does require you to request access for now. For me, it took at least a couple weeks
before I got the invite email. However, that was before they even were calling it Adobe Podcast,
before it was called Project Shasta, so they might be rolling it out faster than when I signed up,
I don't know. Anyway, this is how it looks when you're logged in. If you scroll down,
you can see the Speech Enhancer tool we just looked at. It's the same thing,
so having access doesn't add any exclusive features or anything, if you are wondering.
There's also this other Mic Check tool, which basically has you talk in your microphone for
a few seconds, and it'll tell you if there are any issues like background noise or echo,
you can see here. I tested it with my headset microphone,
and it basically just said that the gain or the volume might be turned up too high,
but I don't really use this microphone for videos anyway. Then again, I guess
I could use that from now on if I wanted, because of the other Voice Enhancer tool.
And then finally, at the top of the page, you'll see the main project interface. So
you can create a project where you basically drag an audio file or multiple into here,
and then it will first transcribe the audio, and then you can edit
the transcription. It lets you add music and stuff to different parts.
For example, this is a template project where it lets you add music, and it'll play for that
following section, that sort of thing. And then under Filters, you can see it also has
the ability to apply that Audio Enhancer tool. Now, this whole audio project thing is not really
something I have a need for, I just really like the Audio Enhancer tool, but still kind of cool.
So you might be wondering after all this, how this can actually benefit you? Why should you
care? And if you haven't thought of any ideas already, I'll give you a few right
off the top of my head. First, if you are doing a presentation for school or work,
the thing is with audio, bad audio is often way worse than bad video.
People can usually tolerate low resolution video and stuff, but if you have really annoying,
echoey audio, that is like really annoying. So having something like this, if you ever
need to do some kind of audio recording for whatever reason, this is going to be extremely
beneficial for really anyone. And even though this only applies for stuff that's pre-recorded,
I think it's only a matter of time before we have something like this that will work
in real time, so you can use it in like conference calls and stuff like that.
That will definitely come at some point. So let me know if you guys have any uses
for what you want to use this tool for when it comes out of beta or if you get access to
it. Maybe there's something I hadn't even thought of. Also, definitely let me know
what you think of the results that I showed. Do you think they're as amazing as I did?
Now, if you guys enjoyed all this, definitely give the video a big thumbs up. And also here
are some AI generated images related to a thumbs up just for your entertainment. Now,
if you want to keep watching the next video,
I'd recommend is a set of really useful tools published by Microsoft called PowerToys.
For Windows, I think you'll find them really cool. I'll put that link right
here. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.