Conversation Boost: What It Does and How Much It Helps

Conversation Boost is the most useful AirPods setting almost nobody has switched on. It’s free, it’s been shipping since iOS 15, it’s still in the current AirPods User Guide, and it’s buried four levels deep in Accessibility where nobody goes looking. What it does is narrow: it points the AirPods Pro microphones at the person in front of you and turns their voice up relative to everything else.

The reason to care is that somebody measured it. The National Acoustic Laboratories put AirPods Pro on a test rig and came back with numbers that land in the same range hearing aid manufacturers quote for directional microphones. That study sits at the bottom of page one where nobody reads it, while the pages above it either tell you which buttons to press or tell you whether it works, never both.

So this is both. If you don’t own AirPods Pro, the last section is yours, and the honest version is that an amplifier app like Clarive gets you part of the way on the headphones you already have, without the directional microphones that do most of the work here. The rest of what an iPhone can do for hearing is collected in our iPhone hearing tools guides.

What Conversation Boost actually does

Each AirPod has more than one microphone, and when you have several microphones separated by a known distance, you can compare when a sound arrives at each one and work out which direction it came from. Favor the sounds arriving from straight ahead, suppress the rest, and you have a beam. That’s beamforming, and it’s the same trick a directional hearing aid microphone pulls.

Conversation Boost turns that beam on and aims it forward. It only runs in Transparency mode, because Transparency is the mode where outside sound is being passed into your ears in the first place. Noise cancellation is doing the opposite job, so the setting doesn’t apply there.

It’s worth being precise about what this is not. It doesn’t make the room quieter, it changes the ratio between the voice you want and the noise you don’t. Your ears still get the clatter. The person across the table just sits further above it.

How to turn it on

Three switches, in order, and the first two are why people can’t find the third.

On an iPhone or iPad, with the AirPods in and connected:

1. Settings, then Accessibility, then Audio & Visual
2. Headphone Accommodations, and turn Headphone Accommodations on
3. Turn on Transparency, tap Customize Transparency, then turn on Conversation Boost

On a Mac it’s System Settings, Accessibility in the sidebar, Audio, Headphone Accommodations on, Transparency Mode on, then Conversation Boost.

While you’re in that screen, turn Ambient Noise Reduction up. It’s a separate slider on the same page, it does a different job, and the two stack. The lab numbers below are only fully earned with both of them working. Apple’s own walkthrough is on the Transparency mode page of the AirPods User Guide, which is also the best evidence that this feature is still current rather than a leftover from 2021.

How much it actually helps, measured

In 2022, four researchers at the National Acoustic Laboratories published an evaluation of AirPods Pro with Conversation Boost in noise. They sat a listener in the middle of a 2.7 meter ring of loudspeakers, put multi-talker babble at 65 dB behind and beside them, and put the target voice directly in front at a signal-to-noise ratio of minus 3 dB. That last number is the point of the whole setup. Minus 3 dB is roughly what a busy cafe does to a conversation.

Here’s what they measured, as a signal-to-noise advantage weighted for the frequencies speech lives in:

Two things in that table matter more than the headline. The first is the top row: amplification on its own, with no directionality, bought nothing in noise. It made everything louder, including the babble, which is exactly the failure mode people describe when they say turning the volume up didn’t help. The second is the benchmark the authors cite for conventional directional hearing aid microphones, which is 3 to 6 dB. A pair of earbuds landed at the top of that range and slightly past it.

Now the caveat, and it’s theirs, not mine. All that noise came from the sides and the rear. When noise is diffuse, meaning it’s coming at you from everywhere including in front, the authors say to expect less. They also ran this on one adult participant with probe microphones in the ear canal, on the original AirPods Pro with iOS 15.1. It’s a careful acoustic measurement, not a clinical trial.

Conversation Boost is not the other three things

This is where most of the confusion on this topic lives, and Apple has done nothing to help. Four different features overlap, and people mix them up constantly.

Conversation Awareness is the automation. Your AirPods hear you start speaking, duck the music, and lift the voices near you until you stop. It runs on a much wider set of hardware than Conversation Boost and it isn’t aimed at anything. Different feature, different purpose.

The Hearing Aid feature is the serious one. On AirPods Pro 2 and 3 it takes the result of Apple’s own AirPods hearing test and shapes amplification to your measured loss, which is a genuinely different order of thing from a forward-facing beam. We covered what it does and who it’s for separately. If your AirPods support it, use it, and treat Conversation Boost as a complement rather than an alternative.

Live Listen uses your iPhone as a remote microphone and sends audio to your AirPods, which is the answer when the person you want to hear is across a room rather than across a table. It’s also the one with the hardware restriction people run into hardest.

Headphone Accommodations, the setting Conversation Boost lives inside, shapes tone and amplification to a profile. Useful, and as the table above shows, close to useless in noise on its own.

When it won’t help

I’d rather say this plainly than sell the feature. Conversation Boost is directional, so its entire value depends on the noise not being where the voice is. In a room where the noise is uniform, or where four people at your table are all talking, the beam has nothing to reject and you get most of the clatter back.

It also assumes you’re facing the person you want to hear. Turn your head to your dinner and the beam turns with it. And it’s still passing a loud room into your ears, which is why Apple ships Loud Sound Reduction alongside it.

None of that makes it a hearing aid, and it can’t tell you anything about your hearing. If conversations have been getting harder over months rather than in one loud room, that’s an audiologist’s question, and the NIDCD’s overview of age-related hearing loss is a better first read than any settings guide. Sudden hearing loss in one ear is urgent, not a setting to adjust.

If you don’t own AirPods Pro

Buy them, if the money is there and you were going to buy earbuds anyway. I build a listening app for a living and I’ll still say that. Around $250 of hardware that does beamforming in silicon beats software running on a phone microphone, and you get the Hearing Aid feature and the hearing test with it.

If the money isn’t there, or you already own headphones you like, the substitute is a phone-based amplifier. Clarive is mine. It takes audio from the iPhone’s microphone, applies amplification and filtering, and plays it back through whatever headphones you’ve got connected, wired EarPods included. There’s no AirPods requirement and no extra hardware.

Voice Isolation focuses on the person in front of you, Focus Mode narrows to sounds ahead, and one of the five presets is called Noisy Place. All of it processes on-device, so no audio goes anywhere. The free tier caps you at five uses a day, and paid plans run from $4.99 to $29.99 depending on the billing period.

The limit, said properly: your phone has one microphone array in one place, and that place is usually the table or your pocket. A phone lying face up between two dinner plates is pointed at the ceiling, and no amount of processing fixes an aim problem. Earbuds sit on your head and turn when you turn, which is a structural advantage software doesn’t have. If you go this route, prop the phone up and point it at the person. It’s also not a hearing aid and it can’t test your hearing. It makes speech easier to follow in the moment, which on a Tuesday night is the thing you actually needed.

The short version

Turn it on. It costs nothing, it’s measurably worth several decibels in the one situation it was built for, and if you own AirPods Pro you already own it. Then sit with your back to the room, face the person, and don’t expect it to fix a table of six.

Ready to try the app version on the headphones you already have? Get Clarive on the App Store.