Doritos Creates AI That Silences the Sounds of Crunching While Gaming

Listening to someone crunchily eating Doritos is probably high on many lists of annoying behavior but imagine how much worse it must be to listen to the crunching in a headset while playing against a Dorito-eating opponent in a video game. In a beautiful example of knowing their audience, Doritos commissioned an AI company to quantify more than 5000 types of crunching sounds so they could build "crunch canceling" technology that would let users mute it out.

While reading about this, it was hard not to imagine all the other ways that this sort of AI-generated sound-canceling tech would be useful. I would have loved it yesterday while walking through the tunnel of misery at Dulles Airport (where the loud and excessively annoying ad jingle for Penfolds bank playing on repeat creates a hostile walking environment). Like the crunching of Doritos, there are some sounds that humans shouldn't have to suffer through.