AI software will remove Doritos crunch from gamers' headsets. What an age we live in
Problem: People who eat Doritos like the crunch; people who must listen to other people eating Doritos hate the crunch. Whatever do we do?
Well fortunately, since we are a can-do, problem-solving sort of nation, the crisis has been solved with the creation of software that subtracts out crunch sounds from online games, Zoom meetings, phones or anything else that employs a microphone.
Thank heaven. Climate change will have to wait, but at least as the planet burns we will all die without having to listen to the sound of other people chewing.
Doritos says the software is mostly aimed at gamers who are loath to interrupt their entertainment long enough to eat, interact with their families or engage in any other behavior that might be considered normal.
I wouldn’t know. I was of the gaming era in which a triangle on a black and white screen fired shots at moving rocks. As the game went on, the number of these “asteroids” increased and gained speed, but the hack was to move your “spaceship” at high speeds while firing — what am I talking about, no one cares.
Today of course, you can play people from around the world in games where things explode, people are shot, riotous armies roam the streets, and other things happen that basically mimic an average night in Portland, Ore.
But a gamer’s gotta eat, and therein lies the problem, particularly since Doritos are a preferred snack. “Crunch is one of the most distracting features that could throw someone off their game,” Mustafa Shamseldin, chief marketing officer of international foods at PepsiCo, which owns Doritos, told The Washington Post.
We’d hate for a kid to get knocked off his game. He might get frustrated and do something totally nuts, like go outside to play.
But apparently crunching is a serious problem. “That’s always been a distraction for me,” software developer Dylan Fashbaugh told the Post. “I’ll lose my focus when one person starts eating. That sound of crunching can just take you out of the experience, but you still want to enjoy your snack, because, realistically, snacking and gaming go hand in hand.”
I had no idea gamers had such a hard life. Here I thought it was all fun and, well, games. I had no idea gamers were presented with logistical challenges that rank up there with freeing the Ever Given from the Suez Canal.
Interestingly, it’s not the first time that Doritos re-engineering has come up. There was brief talk of a “Doritos for Women” that would have had less crunch and less neon-colored powder that gets all over your fingers and clothes.
It never went anywhere, which was a shame, because I can’t imagine how many guys never get past a first date because they show up with a rim of vaguely glowing orange dust around their mouths.
From the story, I’m not entirely clear whether this crunch-canceling software is installed on the device of the cruncher or the crunchee. It would have to be the crunchee, right? I don’t mean to stigmatize, but gamers tend not to be — how do you say — the most self-aware members of society. As they munch away, I can’t imagine they are taking other gamers’ feelings into consideration, and hence would not be prone to install the software strictly for the comfort of others.
Be that as it may, software developers dutifully recorded 500 people eating Doritos and then, the Post writes, used the audio “to simulate 5,000 different crunch sounds.”
“Then, we took sounds of lots of us talking and other people talking, and mixed those together with the crunch sounds so we could generate an AI that could learn the sound of crunching and voicing,” Fashbaugh said.
You’ve heard all those fears that AI will be used to destroy the world? I’m not half as worried now that I’ve read this.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Gamers don't have to stop to eat Doritos thanks to crunch-canceling AI
