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Going out to lunch or dinner can be a great way to catch up with a friend unless of course, you manage to accidentally pick the loudest restaurant in town for your hour-long hangout.




While apps like Yelp can help you figure out what the food might be like or whether or not a spot has free Wi-Fi, there isn’t a rating for noise level. Now one startup is attempting to offer a solution in the form of an app called iHEARu.



Just like other crowd-sourced apps like Yelp, the app relies entirely on other diners reporting what the noise level is while they’re eating. Restaurant goers can leave their own subjective feedback as well as measure the actual decibel level using their smartphone’s microphone, Food + Wine reports.




Image: iHEARu

Within the app, the noise level its broken down in 30-minute increments. Noise like everything else is variable. The idea is that you can see that a restaurant might be fine on Mondays or Tuesdays, but starts to be loud around dinner time every night after or that you’ll be much better off if you make that reservation for 7:30pm rather than 7pm.



The app launched this week in San Francisco with plans to roll out to other major cities over the next few months, with a goal of being available globally.

