AEC3 is the third-generation acoustic echo canceller in libWebRTC and the default echo remover in Chrome-based calls. It models the echo path from loudspeaker to microphone with an adaptive filter and subtracts the estimated echo from the mic signal, then applies a nonlinear residual-echo suppressor to clean up what the linear filter can't model — important on cheap laptop and phone hardware where speakers distort. AEC3 was engineered for robustness across the huge variety of real-world devices rather than peak performance on ideal ones, handling delay changes, clock drift, and double-talk gracefully. When a WebRTC call has no echo despite a speaker and mic in the same room, AEC3 is usually why.
The book · Volume 4 of 7
Audio for Video: A Complete Guide to Sound in Video Products: From PCM and Codecs to Loudness, Accessibility, and Real-Time Voice Processing
AEC3 is the echo canceller most WebRTC calls already run, so its failures on laptop speakers and during double-talk become your support tickets. Volume 4 covers acoustic echo cancellation in detail as part of real-time voice processing, together with AGC, noise suppression and VAD and how they work as one chain before Opus encoding. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
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