How to Sound Better on Video Calls: Microphones, Diction and Presence on Zoom and Teams

You can prepare the perfect pitch and still lose the room if the room hears you through a laptop mic in an echoing spare bedroom. On a video call, listeners do not just hear your words. They hear the room, the microphone, the software and the network, and they judge you on all of it.

This is part nine of Kurums Speak, our series on business speaking and diction. It takes the voice, pace and presence skills from earlier guides and adapts them to Zoom, Teams and phone calls: the gear that helps, the settings that matter, and the speaking habits that survive compression and lag.

Why does audio quality change how credible you seem?

Most people worry about their camera on video calls. The research suggests they should worry more about their microphone. In 2018, psychologists Eryn Newman (Australian National University) and Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California) published "Good Sound, Good Research" in Science Communication. They played people the same recordings of scientists talking about their work, some with clear audio and some with degraded audio.

With poor sound, listeners rated the scientists as less intelligent and less likeable and judged their research as less important. In a second experiment using well-known scientists from a US radio science program, the effect held even when an introduction listed each scientist's credentials. Same words, same expert; worse audio, lower credibility.

The likely mechanism is processing fluency. When something is hard to process, listeners tend to misattribute that effort to the content or the speaker. A muffled, echoing or clipped voice makes every sentence a little harder to decode, and that friction leaks into judgments of competence.

This matters for anyone who sells, pitches, interviews or leads remotely. Your audio is not a technical detail; it is part of how your expertise is received. The good news is that it is also the cheapest part of your presence to fix. A modest microphone, placed correctly in a room with some soft surfaces, beats an expensive webcam in nearly every meeting.

What microphone should you use for Zoom and Teams calls?

You do not need studio gear. You need a microphone that sits closer to your mouth than to the noise in your room. That one principle explains most of the table below. Laptop microphones sound poor not because they are cheap but because they are far away, so they record as much room as voice.

If you take several calls a day, a headset with a boom mic is the most reliable upgrade: the capsule stays a few centimeters from your mouth whatever you do, and you avoid echo because the other person's voice goes into your ears, not back into the mic. If you present or record regularly, a USB microphone on a small stand or arm will sound richer.

Dynamic or condenser?

Condenser microphones are more sensitive. In a quiet, furnished room that sensitivity gives detailed, natural speech. In a bare home office it also captures the reflections off walls and the hum of the fridge. Dynamic microphones are less sensitive and reject more of the room, which is why reviewers often recommend them for untreated spaces. The trade-off is that a dynamic mic needs you to stay close.

A note on earbuds: they are excellent for hearing the call, but their microphones are usually at your ear, and Bluetooth often switches to a lower-quality "headset" audio mode when the mic is active. For an important pitch or interview, test them against a wired option before you rely on them.

How far should your microphone be from your mouth?

Distance is the setting that matters most, and it is free. Sound level from your voice drops roughly 6 decibels each time the distance doubles, while the room noise around you stays the same. Moving a microphone from 60 cm to 15 cm is two halvings, so your voice is roughly 12 dB louder relative to the background. That is a bigger improvement than most software settings can deliver.

As a starting point:

• Headset boom mic: two or three finger-widths from the corner of your mouth, slightly to the side so breaths do not hit it directly.
• USB dynamic mic: roughly 5 to 15 cm (a hand's width), angled toward your mouth.
• USB condenser mic: roughly 15 to 30 cm, pointed at your mouth, in a quiet room.
• Lavalier: clipped center-chest, about a hand's width below the chin, on the side you are likely to turn toward.

Two refinements help. First, place the mic slightly off-axis (pointed at the corner of your mouth rather than straight in front) to avoid popping on "p" and "b" sounds. Second, be aware of the proximity effect: directional microphones boost bass as you get very close. A little makes a voice sound warm and full; too much sounds boomy. If you sound muddy, back off a few centimeters.

Once the mic is placed, keep your head in roughly the same spot. Leaning back in your chair halfway through a call can halve your level, and a listener hears that as you trailing off.

How do you fix echo and room acoustics at home?

Echo on calls has two different causes, and they need different fixes. Acoustic echo is when your speakers play other people's voices and your microphone picks them up again; headphones solve it almost completely. Room reverberation is your own voice bouncing off hard surfaces and arriving at the mic a fraction of a second late, which makes you sound distant and hollow, as if you were calling from a bathroom.

Reverberation is the one people underestimate. Bare walls, glass, hard floors and empty shelves reflect sound. Soft, irregular surfaces absorb or scatter it. You do not need foam panels; the furniture you already own does most of the job.

• Choose the softest room. A bedroom or a furnished living room usually beats an empty spare room or a kitchen.
• Add soft surfaces near you. A rug under the desk, curtains over a window, a sofa or upholstered chair behind you, a full bookshelf. Even a thick throw over a chair out of camera shot helps.
• Avoid sitting in the middle of a bare room or facing a hard wall at close range.
• Reduce noise at source. Close windows, move away from the fridge or washing machine, and keep laptop fans quiet by closing heavy apps.
• Clap test. Clap once where you sit. If you hear a ringing tail, the room is lively; add soft material until the clap sounds dull.

Which Zoom and Teams audio settings actually matter?

Both platforms run your voice through processing before anyone hears it: noise suppression, echo cancellation and automatic level control. These are designed for typical laptop setups and they are usually helpful. A few settings are worth knowing, and setting names change between versions, so check them in your own app.

Zoom

In the desktop app, go to Settings > Audio. Under the audio profile you will find background noise suppression with levels: Auto (the default), Low, Medium and High. Low handles steady noise such as a fan or air conditioner; High is the most aggressive and filters things like typing and barking, but can occasionally clip parts of your own voice. If people say words are cutting out, step the level down.

Original sound for musicians is a different mode. It passes your microphone signal through without Zoom's echo cancellation and audio enhancements, for musicians and for people using equipment that already handles those jobs. For ordinary speech it is usually the wrong choice: if you are on laptop speakers without headphones, turning off that processing can let echo through to everyone else. Use it only if you know why you need it, and wear headphones if you do. Leave Automatically adjust microphone volume on unless you have set your gain carefully.

Microsoft Teams

In the Teams desktop app, Settings > Devices (or Audio settings during a meeting) has a Noise suppression control. Microsoft suggests turning it off only for high-quality microphones in quiet, studio-like rooms. Some versions show levels such as Auto, Low and High. Teams also offers voice isolation: after you record a short voice profile under Settings > Recognition, Teams can filter out other people's voices in the background as well as noise. It is useful in shared homes and open offices; it may be unavailable if your IT admin has disabled it.

Settings outside the app

Select the correct microphone explicitly in the app rather than leaving it on "default", which can quietly switch to your laptop mic when a headset disconnects. Run the built-in audio test before important calls. If your level meter barely moves, raise the input gain in your operating system; if it hits the top when you speak normally, lower it.

How do you handle lag and turn-taking on video calls?

In face-to-face conversation, the gap between one person finishing and the next starting is tiny. A cross-language study of turn-taking led by Tanya Stivers in PNAS (2009) found that speakers in ten languages aim to minimize gaps and overlaps, with small differences between cultures. Researchers often summarize the typical gap as around 200 milliseconds. Our turn-taking runs on fine timing.

Video calls stretch that timing. The International Telecommunication Union's guidance for voice networks (ITU-T G.114) treats one-way delays below about 150 milliseconds as essentially transparent for most uses; longer delays start to disrupt interaction. Even small, consistent lags matter: a University of Michigan study led by Julie Boland, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, found that people took longer to start their turns over Zoom than in person, which is part of why remote conversations feel stilted.

Practical fixes

• Pause a beat longer before you start speaking, and after asking a question. What feels like an awkward silence to you is often just the delay.
• Hand over by name. "Priya, what's your read on the timeline?" removes the collision of three people starting at once.
• Signal the end of your turn. Let your pitch fall clearly and use a closing phrase: "That's my update."
• Do not talk over a cut-in. If two people start together, stop, and offer the floor: "Go ahead." Push-through overlaps on compressed audio become unintelligible for everyone.
• Use a wired connection or sit close to the router for important calls; Wi-Fi drops are a common source of the freezes that wreck timing.

How should you adjust your diction for compressed audio?

Call audio is compressed and filtered. Codecs are tuned for speech, but they still smear fast, quiet detail, and noise suppression can mistake the soft end of a word for noise. The sounds that suffer first are the ones that carry meaning: final consonants ("fifteen" vs "fifty", "can" vs "can't"), unstressed syllables and the last few words of a sentence that has run out of breath.

A few small adjustments, which would sound slightly theatrical in a quiet room, sound simply clear on a call:

• Slow down a little. Not a lot; perhaps 10 percent. Give each idea a short pause after it.
• Finish your consonants. Land the t in "can't", the d in "approved", the s in "costs".
• Hold volume to the end of the sentence. Trailing off is the number one complaint on remote calls.
• Say numbers twice, two ways. "Fifteen, one-five, thousand." Then put key figures in the chat.
• Front-load the point. Lead with the conclusion, then the reason, in case the line drops mid-sentence.

For more on precise consonants, see our articulation drills; for pacing, pace, pauses and filler words.

How do you look present on camera?

Presence on video is mostly geometry and light. When your camera is below your face, you look down at people. When you look at their faces on screen rather than at the lens, you appear to be looking slightly away. Neither is a disaster, but both remove a little of the connection you would have in a room.

• Camera at eye level. Raise the laptop on books or a stand so the lens is level with your eyes, about an arm's length away.
• Frame head and shoulders. Leave a little space above your head and show your shoulders and some of your hands; it makes gestures visible and reads as relaxed.
• Look at the lens for key moments. You do not need to stare at the camera all the time, but deliver your opening, your key number and your ask to the lens. Moving the video window right under the camera helps.
• Light from the front. Face a window or put a lamp behind the screen. A bright window behind you turns you into a silhouette.

Video calls are also tiring in specific ways. Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, writing in Technology, Mind and Behavior (2021), proposed four causes of "Zoom fatigue": intense close-up eye contact, constantly seeing yourself, reduced mobility and the extra effort of sending and reading nonverbal cues. His suggested fixes are practical for speakers too: shrink the video window rather than going full screen, hide self-view once your framing is right, sit a little further back so you can move, and take audio-only breaks.

How do you keep your energy up on screen?

A camera flattens you. The small cues that carry energy in a room (a shift of weight, a glance around the table, the room's own buzz) mostly disappear, and audio processing smooths out some of the variety in your voice. Speakers who sound lively in person can come across as subdued on a call. Turning your energy up about 10 to 20 percent usually reads as natural on the other end.

Energy is not volume. It is variety and intention:

• Stand up for presentations and high-stakes calls if you can. Breathing is freer and your voice has more range.
• Use your hands inside the frame. Gesture shapes your intonation even if people only half see it.
• Smile on the first word. A genuine smile changes the sound of the voice, and it is audible on a phone line.
• Vary pitch on key words and pause after them. Variety survives compression better than raw loudness.
• Warm up. Five minutes of lip trills, humming and your opening lines (see our speaking voice guide) stops the first minute sounding like you just woke up.

How do you present a slide deck remotely?

When you share your screen, your face shrinks to a thumbnail and the slide becomes the main event. That changes the job. People can read faster than you can talk, so a text-heavy slide makes them read while you speak, and they stop listening to both. Remote decks should be simpler than in-person ones.

• One idea per slide, headline as a sentence. "Churn fell to 4% after the onboarding change" beats "Churn analysis".
• Say the point before you show it. Then advance, then explain. Listeners hear the conclusion even if the screen share lags.
• Use the presenter view on a second screen so you can see notes and the chat without fumbling windows.
• Stop sharing for discussion. Returning to gallery view brings faces back and invites people in.
• Signpost often. "Three points; this is the second." Remote audiences lose their place more easily.
• Send the deck afterwards, not before, unless it is a pre-read. Otherwise people read ahead.
• Rehearse the tech. Share your screen once in a test meeting to check fonts, animations, video sound and which window is actually shared.

How do you sound better on phone calls?

Phone calls remove the picture entirely, so your voice carries everything: warmth, confidence, attention. Traditional phone audio is also narrower than most video-call audio, which makes clear diction even more important.

• Use a headset or earbuds with a mic, not speakerphone. Speakerphone adds room echo and makes you sound far away.
• Do not cradle the phone between ear and shoulder. NIDCD lists this as a voice-care don't, because it strains the neck muscles that support your voice.
• Stand or sit tall. Slumping compresses breath, and it is audible.
• Use the person's name and verbal nods. Without a face, short acknowledgements ("Right", "That makes sense") show you are listening.
• Summarize at the end. "So: I'll send the revised quote by Friday, and you'll confirm volumes." Then follow up in writing.
• Find a quiet spot. On mobile networks especially, background noise and the processing that fights it can chop up your words.

Finally, protect your voice on heavy call days: water within reach, short silent breaks between calls, and no talking over a noisy café. The vocal health habits in our voice guide apply doubly when you spend six hours on calls.

Frequently asked questions

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