If you've ever been tempted to sneak a snack during a work call but were scared your crunch would give you away, there could be an answer
Available today, Doritos has launched what it calls "Doritos Silent" — an AI-powered crunch-canceling app.
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How do you train AI to cancel crunches? According to the company, Doritos enlisted approximately 500 people to crunch chips (official Doritos, of course) into a microphone 10 times each. These 5,000 crunches were fed into an AI to train it to identify what that sounded like, in order to ensure that the noise could be isolated. Then those sounds were mixed with the sounds of people talking to simulate what it would sound like if someone was munching while talking.
While the app is intended for gamers who may spend hours at a time communicating through headsets, it claims to work on anything that accepts a microphone, including Zoom, Google Voice, and Discord. Once the app is installed, it functions by essentially replacing your default microphone. You'll need to head into the settings of whatever program you're using and switch the mic to "Doritos Silent" to take advantage of the feature.
It also works, the company said, on any crunchy snack — not just Doritos.
As silly as this is, I had to test it for myself. After installing the program, I fired up Google Voice and gave my cell phone a call. Under normal conditions, my chip crunching did admittedly get annoying fast. But when I flipped the switch, the sounds disappeared. I tried several snacks, and each one was now perfectly silent over the call.
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I tried to trick the program with what I felt was a pretty convincing fake crunch sound, but the AI didn't believe me and let the sound slide.
Unfortunately, the app is only available right now for Windows PCs, but support for other devices is coming. Equally unfortunate, there's no AI answer yet for the video of you stuffing your face on a Zoom call — but that's what the "Camera off" button is for.
