At the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles this week, the company gave a sneak peek of its Project Awesome Audio, which will clean up problematic audio recordings in Adobe Audition with the click of a button. The project is the brainchild of Adobe research scientist Zeyu Jin who, back in 2016, demonstrated a tool that allows the user to easily insert speech into an existing clip. For Project Awesome Audio, Jin, with Princeton University computer science PhD student Jiaqi Su, leveraged Adobe’s Sensei AI for “end-to-end audio enhancement.” Adobe also showcased a mobile Photoshop app, a new AR authoring app, and more.

Engadget reports that Jin “explains audio enhancement is typically situational, where you have to use specific tools to fix specific problems.” All those edits can take a lot of time so, “to remedy this, Jin and Su created a one-click solution that doesn’t merely reduce the degradation, but … extracts the speech from the audio clip.” That enables Project Awesome Audio to “handle difficult edits like reverb, or an overly echo-y room, that might not even be possible with software.”

“First, we want to make everything [noise, artifacts, reverb] much simpler,” said Jin. “No need to learn which tool to use in each situation. We want to reduce degradation in one go.”

To access Project Awesome Audio, the user opens a file in Adobe Audition, clicks the button, which “triggers a script and taps into Sensei’s AI abilities to do the heavy lifting.” Jin demonstrated fixing “some intense microphone degradation … [and] with a click … was able to clean up the clip in seconds, and the result sounded like it was recorded with a professional microphone.”

Also fixable are issues with audio recorded in two locations. “It isn’t perfect — you’ll still need to make some basic volume adjustments — but the noise, extra reverb and microphone degradation were all gone,” notes Engadget. Jin added that even audio recorded with mobile devices, which “rarely sounds good when you’re using your phone’s mic like a speakerphone and multiple people are talking,” Project Awesome Audio can save the day.

Engadget adds that, “there’s no guarantee this tool will make it to the desktop app” since the sneak peek is aimed at gathering feedback “before making any concrete plans.”

Related:
Adobe Shoots For the Future With Photoshop Camera App For iOS and Android, Digital Trends, 11/4/19
Adobe’s Photoshop Camera Is an AI-Powered Photo Editor For Your Phone, TechCrunch, 11/4/19
Adobe’s Latest Experiment Tracks Your Body to Create Super Quick Animations, The Verge, 11/5/19
Adobe Is Bringing Real-Time Collaboration to Its XD Design Tool, TechCrunch, 11/4/19
Adobe Launches Aero, Its AR Authoring App, TechCrunch, 11/4/19