KRISP — anti-noise tool with AI-power for Zoom-calls
A couple of months ago, I came across news that another tech startup KRISP had raised $9M. The post said that a group of Armenian scientists had developed an algorithm that helps to cope with external noise when you make calls via Zoom or Skype.
For me, this post hit the spot, as our family has three energetic toddlers who now have to stay home, and it isn’t very easy to talk them into their rooms. Those families who have more than one child understand me perfectly, I think. And although there is a separate place for making work calls, still, the sounds and noise produced by “universe savers,” “galactic warriors,” “monsters,” “aliens,” “dinosaurs,” and other fantasy characters for children sometimes arise at the most inopportune moment — during an important call or interview.
I have long been interested in productivity and am in constant search of various services and tools to increase productivity. I recently shared my database of valuable utilities and services within the Startup Services project. Naturally, I couldn’t avoid KRISP and decided to try it out in action!
What is KRISP?
KRISP was founded by two natives of Armenia, Artavazd Minasyan and Davit Baghdasaryan, in October 2017. According to the website, at the time of its founding, the company had seven employees, 6 of whom were Ph.D. of physical or mathematical sciences.
The company now has 25 employees working on product development and research — all of whom are based in Armenia. “By the end of 2021, it will be a team of 45 people, all from Armenia,” Baghdasaryan said.
According to founder Davit Baghdasaryan, in 2020 alone, the company’s revenue grew by 2000%, the number of users increased 20-fold, and the number of corporate users by 23-fold. The total audience of users is more than 1 million people and more than 1,200 companies. Among our main clients are banks, law agencies, HR platforms, call centers. KRISP cooperates with GitHub, Zapier, Discord, Intel. Of course, such explosive growth has been influenced by the pandemic, the increase in communications through Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, and other video conferencing tools.
The company raised $5M in August 2020 and another $9M in February 2021. According to Crunchbase, the total amount raised is $17.5M. KRISP plans to spend investor money on hiring new employees, increasing sales, and marketing.
From Idea to Product
Davit Baghdasaryan came up with the idea of a service that would hide extraneous noise in 2016. At that time, he was working at Twilio, which specialized in API for corporate communications. During numerous business trips, he had to communicate with the team while being in various places, from cafes to the airport. He shared his idea with his friend Artavazd Minasyan, a doctoral candidate in mathematics.
In the fall of 2017, Baghdasaryan quit Twilio and came to Armenia, where he and Minasyan created a joint company and began developing noise-canceling technology.
How does it work?
KRISP noise reduction technology is based on machine learning. The team used two sets of data to train the neural network: the first was tens of thousands of audio recordings of different noises, and the second was pure audio recordings of a human speech made in the studio.
After lengthy experiments to train the neural network by combining different versions of noise and voice, they obtained a workable technology.
The technology can block both incoming and outgoing extraneous sounds. For example, when your interlocutor is in a busy, noisy place, and you are quiet and quiet, you can enable noise suppression only for your interlocutor by moving only one of the sliders. The second situation is the opposite. When you have a lot of extraneous noise in the background, you’d better turn on noise reduction mode — by moving the microphone slider.
Examples of annoying sounds and noises that the technology can cope with are banging keys, a dog howling, rustling paper, airport, cafe or street noise, water noise, crying or screaming baby.
In the additional settings of the service, there is an option to remove echoes, but the developers warn that this feature is still experimental.
Does it really work?
The technology is currently implemented as a desktop application for Windows and macOS.
The app itself has an extremely minimalist design and can integrate with the following applications: Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, Slack, Google Hangouts, Facetime, Webex.
You can also use KRISP in other applications by selecting krisp microphone and krips speaker in the application settings, respectively.
The status of microphone and speaker usage is displayed in the app
In recent versions, the developers have added a handy semi-transparent widget that appears automatically when you call and displays the status. Whether or not the noise-canceling technology is currently active.
For example, in my Zoom, the sound settings are as follows:
The settings of the application do not contain any surprising elements either. Everything is concise and straightforward.
The free version has a limit of 120 minutes per week, which may be enough if your calls from noisy places are pretty rare.
The personal PRO version of the app costs $5 per month and removes the limit of 120 minutes per week.
The team tariff also costs $5 per month per user (for teams of up to 50 people) and adds options like team management, billing control, single sign-on, priority support.
For larger corporate customers, the terms of the tariff are not disclosed and are available upon request.
Resources where you can find information and video reviews to help with the installation and setup process:
* What’s new
* Blog
* YouTube video tutorials
* Help Center
Impressions from personal use
As a person who is not accustomed to believe advertisements and checks all the tools by himself — I have experience as a Linux admin in the past :) I used a free version of the app and made actual tests!
For example, during the Zoom call, I asked my children to especially shout and run around pretending to take off and land jet fighters. Periodically turning on and off KRISP I would ask my conversation partner if he felt any difference in the voice quality, if he could hear background noises, etc.
Of course, there are no miracles, and if there is a lot of noise around you, shouting, the quality of your voice can not be compared with audio recording in a studio. However, according to my interlocutors, they heard all those noises “somewhere very far away”, but the kids were running around my table, glad that they finally had such a unique opportunity to make noise in their father’s office :)))
Would I continue to use KRISP, and would I recommend it to my friends and associates who have similar problems? Definitely, yes.
Best wishes for a good day and high-quality communication without annoying noises,
Pavel Cherkashin
