Krisp for interviews: noise cancellation first, AI notes second

Krisp is a noise cancellation tool first and an AI meeting assistant second, and both run without a bot joining the call. As of September 2026 it installs as a virtual audio device on your computer, filtering your microphone and, on the other side, the other party's audio too, before either reaches Zoom, Teams, Meet or a phone call. The AI Meeting Assistant layered on top records, transcribes and summarizes, included in every paid plan alongside the noise cancellation. What it does not have is anything built for hiring specifically: no ATS integration, no competency scorecard, and no candidate-facing consent workflow beyond an optional notification setting.

This page covers what Krisp's own pages document for a call: how the bot-free capture actually works at the system level, the noise cancellation feature that sets it apart from most notetakers, plans, candidate notice, and where it stops for recruiting. Every claim links to the page we checked.

How Krisp captures an interview

• A virtual audio device, not an app plugin. Krisp's noise cancellation page describes installing the app, then selecting "Krisp Microphone" as your input and "Krisp Speaker" as your output inside whatever conferencing tool you use.
• Works underneath any app. Because it sits at the system audio level rather than inside one video platform, Krisp's site names Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex and Slack huddles as places it works, plus phone calls made through the same computer.
• No participant joins. Nothing shows up in the meeting's participant list, unlike a bot-based notetaker.
• Two-way filtering. Krisp's page describes removing noise on your own microphone and, separately, filtering noise coming from the other participant, so a candidate calling from a noisy location can also sound clearer to you.

The system-level approach is the reason Krisp can cover a phone screen the way a browser extension cannot: if the call audio passes through your computer at all, Krisp can filter and, on paid plans, transcribe it, regardless of which specific app is technically carrying the call.

Noise cancellation: the feature Krisp is actually known for

Krisp built its reputation on noise removal before it added meeting notes, and for recruiting that heritage has a direct use: a candidate joining from a coffee shop, a shared apartment or a construction site is a common problem on phone screens and video calls alike, and background noise is one of the more common reasons a transcript comes back with gaps or misheard words. Krisp's own materials describe the underlying models as trained on large sets of both noise and voice recordings to tell the two apart, and describe processing happening on the device rather than uploading raw audio to filter it in the cloud.

For an interviewer, this matters more than it might for a general meeting: candidates rarely control their own environment the way an employee joining from an office does, and a clearer signal going into whatever transcript tool you use, Krisp's own or another one, means fewer garbled quotes in the write-up you show a hiring manager.

It also cuts the other way. Krisp's listener-side filtering cleans up what you hear from the candidate, but the candidate hears you more clearly too if you also run Krisp, which is a smaller but real benefit when an interviewer is calling from a shared office or between other meetings. A desk that runs a lot of phone screens from mixed environments, home, car, coworking space, gets more day-to-day value from this than a team that only ever interviews from a quiet office, where the noise problem barely exists to begin with.

Krisp's plans, in interview terms

As published on Krisp's pricing page, as of September 2026.

Krisp's pricing page states there is no separate, cheaper plan for noise cancellation alone, since it is bundled into every tier alongside the meeting assistant. A recruiter who only wants clearer audio, with no transcript or summary, can turn the notetaking features off and still pay the same price as one who uses both.

Candidate notice: what's automatic and what isn't

Krisp's help documentation describes a setting, managed from the web dashboard, that a user can turn on to notify others when recording a Zoom meeting through the Krisp app. That is opt-in, not a default that fires for every call. Krisp's own blog also publishes general guidance recommending that recording intentions be communicated clearly, that participants be told what is captured, and that consent be obtained where required, though that is general guidance rather than legal advice for your specific state or country, and it does not substitute for checking your own jurisdiction's rules.

Where Krisp stops for recruiting

• No ATS integration. Krisp's site names CRMs such as Salesforce and Pipedrive on its Advanced plan, with no applicant tracking system listed.
• No hiring-specific scorecard. Its output is a transcript, AI notes and action items, not a rubric tied to a job description's competencies.
• Candidate notice is opt-in. As above, the notification setting has to be turned on; it is not automatic by default.
• Desktop-only for the bot-free capture. The virtual audio device approach requires installing Krisp on the computer running the call, which will not help with a call made entirely on a mobile handset with no computer involved.

Settings to check before your first candidate call

• Turn on the Zoom recording notification setting if you want disclosure handled consistently rather than left to memory.
• Add a spoken consent line regardless. An in-meeting notice is easy to miss; our consent script covers what to say out loud at the start of the call.
• Test noise cancellation with a genuinely noisy sample before trusting it on a real screen, since a quiet office test will not tell you how it handles a candidate calling from a busy street.
• Decide on retention separately from transcription. Krisp's guidance on limiting stored data to what you actually need is worth applying to candidate transcripts specifically, not just internal meetings.

A test to run before a real candidate call

Record a two-minute sample with a colleague, one of you speaking from a genuinely noisy spot: a kitchen with a dishwasher running, a phone held near a window on a busy street, or a coworking space between meetings. Play the Krisp-filtered version back and compare it to the same clip unfiltered. Then run the same sample through whichever transcript tool you plan to use, with and without Krisp active, and count how many words differ from what was actually said. That difference is a more honest test of whether noise cancellation earns its place in your workflow than a demo recorded in a silent room, which tells you almost nothing about how it performs on the calls where it would actually matter.

Krisp next to recruiting-specific tools

Who Krisp suits, and who should look elsewhere

• Suits: recruiters and hiring managers whose candidates frequently call from noisy environments, where clearer audio has a direct effect on transcript quality.
• Suits: teams that want one tool covering video calls and phone screens, since the system-level capture does not depend on a specific app's integration.
• Look elsewhere if: ATS write-back or a hiring-specific scorecard matters more than audio quality.
• Look elsewhere if: you want candidate notice built in and automatic rather than a setting you have to remember to turn on.
• Worth pairing with something else: a desk could reasonably run Krisp for the audio quality alone and a separate hiring-specific tool for scorecards and ATS write-back, rather than expecting one product to do both well.