As sister comments have pointed out, I find that it's very much dependent on the phone you're using. If it can't even show me a waveform then I don't think it's going to be able to tease out any sort of speech
Sorry I wasn't clear. It's about the hardware microphone. They're usually optimized to filter out far field sounds and only focus on near field sounds. So if you're trying to understand a conversation from even 10 ft away, it can be a problem. Not saying that's the situation that you encountered, but it does make sense that a $50 phone versus a $500 phone might have different capabilities when it comes to the microphone
It's not a model problem, but it is a SW problem. It should be able to distinguish nearby people from people farther away and give me options to set a threshold on who to include.