Blurring the background during calls has become increasingly popular in recent times. It is an essential feature that enables users to obscure their background during phone calls, creating a more professional and private environment. Blurring the background allows users to focus more on the conversation, without any distractions from the environment. In summary, blurring the background during calls has become a popular feature because it helps maintain privacy, eliminates distractions and adds professionalism.

1. Privacy: When you are on a call, the person on the other end can see & hear everything that is going on in your background. By blurring the background, you are essentially blocking access to your personal space, which can help keep things private.
2. Distractions: A cluttered or distracting background can take away from the focus of the call. Blurring the background can help keep the attention on the conversation, and not on what is going on in the background.
3. Professionalism: Blurring the background can also add a level of professionalism to the call. It shows that you have taken the time to prepare for the call, and that you are taking the conversation seriously.

The blurred background relates to both video and audio:

1. Blurring the video: Every element captured by the camera that is not you image, will be blurred.
2. Blurring the audio: Every sound captured by the microphone that is not your voice will be blurred or even completely removed.

Blurring the video is a built-in standard capability in almost any popular application like Zoom and Teams. On the other hand, blurring the audio and specifically voices of other people in the background is not offered by any of these applications. The tricky part in removing ambient human voices is the ability to identify, in a fraction of a second, if the human voice belongs to you, the primary speaker, or someone else that is talking in the background.

Imagine you are in sitting in an open office environment and making an important business phone call. Your colleagues around you are also talking and therefore their voices will be picked up by your microphone and be heard by the person you talking to. In this case blurring the video is simply not good enough since all the voices of people around you will be heard loud and clear.

The good news are that today there are ways to do voice cancellations that can be performed by a software only without the need to purchase expensive hardware or reconstructing your work environment.