As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, Discord has become an even bigger platform. People have moved their classes onto the streaming platform, and gamers with more spare time than ever have been spending a great amount of time on the program as well.
With more people using it than ever, Discord has been working to not only keep their platform running but to improve it as well. They provided free upgrades for the Go Live feature, allowing 50 people to utilize it instead of 10 so that the larger gatherings of people were able to join each other.
Their newest free upgrade is here, now. Introducing the Krisp Beta, a noise-suppression system used to improve the audio quality of users!
“This new tech detects and removes background noises happening around you so your voice can be heard clearly,” Discord writes in their announcement, linked above. “Have a vacuum running in the background; slam a door; ruffle a bag of chips; keep using your really loud keyboard your friends complain about. They won’t be able to hear it.”
As a side note, I, your lovely author, am literally using this feature as I write this piece while in Discord with a few friends. While they normally yell at me for my mechanical keyboard’s incessant clicking, they’re currently completely unable to hear it unless I tilt my microphone much closer to my keyboard. So, yes, this feature does work incredibly well!
The Krisp Beta was developed in partnership with Krisp, a company that specializes in their AI-powered noise-canceling voice technology that has now been integrated into Discord. This partnership comes at no extra cost to the Discord users, with the Krisp feature being completely free and already integrated for you to activate at your discretion with the most recent update.
And one thing that Discord is very intent on letting users know is that there is no exchange of your information between Discord and Krisp.
“We do not pass any information or data to Krisp when you enable the tech on Discord,” they disclaim. “The machine learning model runs on your device to cancel out noise – no data is ever sent to Krisp’s servers under any circumstances.”
It’s fantastic to see Discord partnering up with other companies to keep free features flowing to their user base. The Krisp beta works excellently, so if you have a noisy keyboard or a loud computer, give it a shot next time your friends are shouting at you over it.
