6 ms·

I thought this was going to be an app that emits some kind of inverse sound through the laptop speakers to neutralize the keypress sound in real life. I wonder

I thought this was going to be an app that emits some kind of inverse sound through the laptop speakers to neutralize the keypress sound in real life. I wonder if that's possible.

DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago
Unfortunately the percussive clacks from a keyboard are probably too broad spectrum to neutralize. These transient waveforms are hard to beat.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  Budum-tish.
- sjwright 6y ago
  You'd be amazed what can be done with the latest machine learning algorithms. But setting those aside, you could still get 90% of the way with some relatively basic stuff. I'd start by identifying the presence of speech—when the user isn't currently speaking, trivial muting is all that's needed. Then the only challenge would be to squelch keyboard noise that overlaps speech. If keyboard input monitoring has enough temporal precision, even the most trivial volume dip (and perhaps a band pass filter) would be a win. Keyboard input monitoring could also be used to continuously tune the algorithm to the loudness of the keyboard noise. Any key press occurring in sonic isolation could be used. Then when there's keyboard noise which overlaps speech, the algorithm will know how much to squelch.
nt2h9uh238h 6y ago
Me too. I still have no idea what this thing is doing. An excellent example for a poorly written landing page.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  It says it mutes the mic while you type.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wongarsu 6y ago
Active sound cancellation is an incredibly hard problem if you don't know the position of the listener.
- asiando 6y ago
  The listener in this case is the microphone, so it has a fixed position related to the sound it would cancel (the keys). So the issue in this case is just that the sound keys produce varies.
  - fastball 6y ago
    I think the OC actually wanted active noise cancellation of the keys for their ears.
powersnail 6y ago
That's my reaction, too. What kind of black magic can mute a physical keyboard? And I was a bit disappointed when I actually clicked. Mac book keyboards can be so loud. I remember in college, a guy in front row took notes on his laptop, and his typing was overpowering the professor. And the professor had a microphone.
franky47 6y ago
No need to go through the speakers, you could detect keystrokes, map them to transients in the recorded audio stream and use a noise gate to reduce their volume (at the cost of a little added latency). Bonus point: this would allow you to speak and type at the same time with minimal reduction of speech comprehension, especially if using a multi-band noise gate (that acts on various frequency bands independently). It's a technique we used for dynamic de-essing (removing plosive "S" sounds in post-prod recordings) in a previous company.
- remram 6y ago
  What he means is hiding the keypress sounds to the local user, not to the recording.
- peterkos 6y ago
  Alternatively, throw some AI in there (https://krisp.ai/ https://krisp.ai/) :P
  - franky47 6y ago
    I'm not a fan of throwing AI at any problem, especially when it concerns signal processing. There is a vast range of great algorithms that can be composed to manipulate audio in all kinds of way, and (human) learning about them is fascinating. I'm afraid of a direction in tech where ML becomes the easy option, and we relinquish control of the technical expertise of the work being done. All for a handful of VC dollars.
fareesh 6y ago
nvidia has some software that you can install if you have a compatible GPU which will take your webcam stream and blur your background or do other background effects. I suppose the challenge here would be to figure out which parts of the audio are the speaker's voice and which parts aren't, and remove the parts that aren't. If the visualization of the audio is such that you can discern speech from other audio, similar to how you can discern the person's silhouette and figure out where the background is, then in theory it should be possible using the same technique. I suppose there are probably some pure audio processing techniques that don't rely on the visualization as well.
- axxl 6y ago
  This exists already, it's called RTX Voice: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice-setup-guide/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice...
Theodores 6y ago
Really keyboards should be engineered to be completely silent. Then, under each key there should be a small piezo electric speaker to make a key click noise for reasons of haptic feedback. The app that goes with this should then be able to do things like make the keyboard sound like an Apple keyboard, or a classic IBM one or even a typewriter. It should be one of those features like how digital cameras have a speaker in them to make a fake shutter sound. Since keyboards can already cost $200+ (Looking at you, Logitech) I don't think this is too much to ask, particularly if spill proof.
- korse 6y ago
  Please elaborate on why keyboards should be engineered to be completely silent. I don't think it a bad trait, and it may be beneficial in certain applications but I don't understand why this should be a universal property of keyboards (like suspension is a universal property of cars).
  - Theodores 6y ago
    So that you don't wake up others such as cats or coworkers.
- Closi 6y ago
  > Under each key there should be a small piezo electric speaker to make a key click noise for reasons of haptic feedback. That's not haptic feedback - Haptic feedback is the kinaesthetic / touch feeling of the keyboard. People are trying to engineer keys that are quieter, however they don't have the same haptic feel. The difference between cherry browns and cherry clears is huge! If someone gets a switch that feels like the brown but is totally silent, they will take the market, but it's hard to see how that is possible. The keys have to be stopped by something to get the correct feel, current attempts to use o-rings create a different feel. It's hard to see how you can do that and be totally silent.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brundolf 6y ago
Hah, I had the exact same thought based on the title
pkamb 6y ago
top answer on this famous Stack Overflow post about muting the iPhone camera shutter sound: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4401232/avfoundation-how-to-turn-off-the-shutter-sound-when-capturestillimageasynchrono https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4401232/avfoundation-how...
robotsquidward 6y ago
I wish! I spent a long time considering if I could detect keyboard sounds through the active microphone and mute on a certain decibel level or typing velocity, etc. or even get as fancy as that sort of noise-cancelling approach. In the end I went with a much more simplistic MVP - though I hope to explore more interesting ways to optimize in the future.

I thought this was going to be an app that emits some kind of inverse sound through the laptop speakers to neutralize the keypress sound in real life. I wonder if that's possible.

DontGiveTwoFlux 6y ago

Unfortunately the percussive clacks from a keyboard are probably too broad spectrum to neutralize. These transient waveforms are hard to beat.

robertlagrant 6y ago
Budum-tish.
sjwright 6y ago
You'd be amazed what can be done with the latest machine learning algorithms. But setting those aside, you could still get 90% of the way with some relatively basic stuff. I'd start by identifying the presence of speech—when the user isn't currently speaking, trivial muting is all that's needed. Then the only challenge would be to squelch keyboard noise that overlaps speech. If keyboard input monitoring has enough temporal precision, even the most trivial volume dip (and perhaps a band pass filter) would be a win. Keyboard input monitoring could also be used to continuously tune the algorithm to the loudness of the keyboard noise. Any key press occurring in sonic isolation could be used. Then when there's keyboard noise which overlaps speech, the algorithm will know how much to squelch.

nt2h9uh238h 6y ago

Me too. I still have no idea what this thing is doing. An excellent example for a poorly written landing page.

robertlagrant 6y ago
It says it mutes the mic while you type.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

wongarsu 6y ago

Active sound cancellation is an incredibly hard problem if you don't know the position of the listener.

asiando 6y ago
The listener in this case is the microphone, so it has a fixed position related to the sound it would cancel (the keys). So the issue in this case is just that the sound keys produce varies.
- fastball 6y ago
  I think the OC actually wanted active noise cancellation of the keys for their ears.

powersnail 6y ago

That's my reaction, too. What kind of black magic can mute a physical keyboard? And I was a bit disappointed when I actually clicked. Mac book keyboards can be so loud. I remember in college, a guy in front row took notes on his laptop, and his typing was overpowering the professor. And the professor had a microphone.

franky47 6y ago

No need to go through the speakers, you could detect keystrokes, map them to transients in the recorded audio stream and use a noise gate to reduce their volume (at the cost of a little added latency). Bonus point: this would allow you to speak and type at the same time with minimal reduction of speech comprehension, especially if using a multi-band noise gate (that acts on various frequency bands independently). It's a technique we used for dynamic de-essing (removing plosive "S" sounds in post-prod recordings) in a previous company.

remram 6y ago
What he means is hiding the keypress sounds to the local user, not to the recording.
peterkos 6y ago
Alternatively, throw some AI in there (https://krisp.ai/ https://krisp.ai/) :P
- franky47 6y ago
  I'm not a fan of throwing AI at any problem, especially when it concerns signal processing. There is a vast range of great algorithms that can be composed to manipulate audio in all kinds of way, and (human) learning about them is fascinating. I'm afraid of a direction in tech where ML becomes the easy option, and we relinquish control of the technical expertise of the work being done. All for a handful of VC dollars.

fareesh 6y ago

nvidia has some software that you can install if you have a compatible GPU which will take your webcam stream and blur your background or do other background effects. I suppose the challenge here would be to figure out which parts of the audio are the speaker's voice and which parts aren't, and remove the parts that aren't. If the visualization of the audio is such that you can discern speech from other audio, similar to how you can discern the person's silhouette and figure out where the background is, then in theory it should be possible using the same technique. I suppose there are probably some pure audio processing techniques that don't rely on the visualization as well.

axxl 6y ago
This exists already, it's called RTX Voice: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice-setup-guide/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice...

Theodores 6y ago

Really keyboards should be engineered to be completely silent. Then, under each key there should be a small piezo electric speaker to make a key click noise for reasons of haptic feedback. The app that goes with this should then be able to do things like make the keyboard sound like an Apple keyboard, or a classic IBM one or even a typewriter. It should be one of those features like how digital cameras have a speaker in them to make a fake shutter sound. Since keyboards can already cost $200+ (Looking at you, Logitech) I don't think this is too much to ask, particularly if spill proof.

korse 6y ago
Please elaborate on why keyboards should be engineered to be completely silent. I don't think it a bad trait, and it may be beneficial in certain applications but I don't understand why this should be a universal property of keyboards (like suspension is a universal property of cars).
- Theodores 6y ago
  So that you don't wake up others such as cats or coworkers.
Closi 6y ago
> Under each key there should be a small piezo electric speaker to make a key click noise for reasons of haptic feedback. That's not haptic feedback - Haptic feedback is the kinaesthetic / touch feeling of the keyboard. People are trying to engineer keys that are quieter, however they don't have the same haptic feel. The difference between cherry browns and cherry clears is huge! If someone gets a switch that feels like the brown but is totally silent, they will take the market, but it's hard to see how that is possible. The keys have to be stopped by something to get the correct feel, current attempts to use o-rings create a different feel. It's hard to see how you can do that and be totally silent.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

brundolf 6y ago

Hah, I had the exact same thought based on the title

pkamb 6y ago

top answer on this famous Stack Overflow post about muting the iPhone camera shutter sound: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4401232/avfoundation-how-to-turn-off-the-shutter-sound-when-capturestillimageasynchrono https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4401232/avfoundation-how...

robotsquidward 6y ago

I wish! I spent a long time considering if I could detect keyboard sounds through the active microphone and mute on a certain decibel level or typing velocity, etc. or even get as fancy as that sort of noise-cancelling approach. In the end I went with a much more simplistic MVP - though I hope to explore more interesting ways to optimize in the future.