Denoising on the Neural Engine
24 August 2026
In June we wrote about the denoiser we run on phones to clean voice recordings, which, at the time, ran on the CPU. On iPhone it now runs on the Neural Engine, roughly twice as fast as before.
Before and after:
| Time to clean 10 seconds of audio | Before (CPU) | After (Neural Engine) |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 12 Pro (2020) | 1.3s | 0.5s |
| iPhone 16 Pro (2024) | 0.7s | 0.4s |
The biggest win here is that iPhone hardware resources are freed up to run all the other things in our app and on your phone, keeping it cooler and delivering a faster voice recording experience.