Test Amazon Voice Focus noise suppression as a command line tool

[hassanctech]

What are you trying to do?

I'm like to test out the Amazon Voice Focus noise suppression / echo cancellation and compare side by side with rnnoise and/or other offerings. Today I see it's integrated as part of the Chime SDK, do you have this available as a command line tool for quick testing a file with noise against Amazon Voice Focus to get an idea for its quality and how it stacks up against other offerings? This is a good way for us to see a "before" and "after" comparison with and without the noise suppression.

How can the documentation be improved to help your use case?

Providing an easy way to test out the noise suppression (I know there is a browser sample which can be run which actually starts/joins a meeting) but a command line tool would be easier/faster.

What documentation have you looked at so far?

[hassanctech]

Another follow-up here so I went on a Chime Meeting using the desktop application (with the voice focus enabled) and at least with my short test it appears to be vastly superior to rnnoise so I'm pretty excited about the idea of using it. Now the question is are there plans to vend it as a separate library and/or do you see any issues with someone doing that who is not using AWS Chime (backend)?

[hassanctech]

I see you have this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/business-productivity/using-amazon-voice-focus-ami-to-reduce-noise-in-audio/

But I'd really like to know if it's possible and are there any issues with using this complete independently from Chime itself? Suppose we have an entirely different application could we use your noise suppression? If it isn't free to use that way then do you allow others to license it?

[devalevenkatesh]

Hi @hassanctech , Thanks for your interest in the Amazon Chime SDK and the Voice Focus feature. Tagging
@richhx if he can provide more insights on this.

[hassanctech]

Yeah any insight you can provide would be helpful!

[richhx]

Hi @hassanctech, sorry for the late reply (I had / still have COVID). We are looking into licensing approaches to use the Voice Focus noise suppression for JavaScript. In the meantime, I would recommend that you use the AMI approach linked in the blog if you would like to use a CLI. The AMI offers a library and simple script that offers processing file inputs/outputs using the library so you can use it more quickly from the command-line. If you have any questions about that, happy to help out.

[hassanctech]

Thanks @richhx sorry to hear about the COVID, I hope you have a quick/complete recovery!

That's cool if you could keep us updated on the licensing approaching to use voice focus that would be awesome!

[richhx]

For sure, I will definitely keep you up to date on that :)