Calling someone up only to hear them noisily munching on a bag of crisps can be annoying, not to mention downright rude. Then again, putting down the snacks during a gaming sesh or a mid-morning lunch meeting is a tough ask, especially when you’ve got hunger pangs.
Fortunately, Doritos has come up with a solution that can finally free our nation of crisp lovers from the faux pas. The US company that’s become synonymous with the Mexican tortilla chip has created “crunch-cancelling” software.
We’ve all heard of noise-cancelling headphones that block out background sounds, but “Doritos Silent” is a free voice-chat filter that only removes crisp crunches. The last time we checked it wasn’t April, so it must be the real deal.
Once downloaded, the software will get to work by silencing the sound of snacking on any app that uses a mic. It does this by using AI and machine learning to scan audio waves for crunch sounds and then removing them in real-time.
Don’t want your colleagues to hear you wolfing down a bag of Monster Munch on Zoom? Switch on Doritos Silent (and switch off your camera). Are the sounds of Wotsits preventing you from hearing your Discord pals on Modern Warfare 3? Activate Doritos Silent. Worried about devouring your third pack of Hula Hoops on a Skype call with your long-distance girlfriend? You get the drift.
Doritos says it took half-a-year to develop the “ground-breaking” tech in collaboration with software developer Dylan Fashbaugh. The software was trained on more than 5,000 different crunch sounds to help it identify the noise of a chip being champed.
Maybe this is what the Government meant when it mentioned using “AI for good” at the AI Safety Summit.
You can download Doritos Silent on Windows from the Doritos website. For the time being, it only works with apps running on PCs, but the company is exploring bringing it to consoles in the future.
