Buds 3 FE filtering speech despite NC being on

Basically what the title says. Just got a pair a few days ago and am really happy with them but noticed that while having noise canceling on that it seems to switch (not actually) to ambient or something when voices are detected, or at least make them more audible.

I'm finding this really frustrating since it kinda defeats the purpose of noise cancellation.

I haven't been able to find any setting in the wearables app that could disable this. Is this just a feature or is something not working right?