A team at the University of Washington has developed AI-powered headphones that let you choose which person to listen to. This is a great help for hard-of-hearing individuals who want to focus on their interlocutor.
Focus is more critical now than ever before. If you own a pair of modern headphones, you probably already know about Active Noise Canceling (ANC). While the feature is good enough if you only want a silent place to focus, it’s a binary tool that sacrifices human interaction. Chatting to people then becomes a faff, slipping headphones off or earbuds out each time your partner or boss wants a word. Enter a pair of AI-assisted noise-cancelling headphones that can detect your interlocutor’s voice signature while blocking out all the other unwanted ruckus.
For their proof-of-concept prototype, the team has attached two binaural microphones to the left and right earcups of an off-the-shelf headphone. The internal system then recognises which voice to focus on and calculates the delay between the left and right microphones. Since you normally receive the voice of a person facing you simultaneously in both ears, the AI omits any sounds that have a delay between ears. It goes without saying that we are talking about delays that are miniscule, meaning the processing and synchronisation of both mics must be on point.
To focus on someone, you simply need to look at said individual for three to five seconds for the AI to recognise the voice. After that, you can move around as you wish, and the AI will keep track of that specific voice while suppressing all the surrounding sound – including speech. It’s the perfect tool to prove to your wives that you are, in fact, paying attention without distraction.
Jokes aside, this is an excellent use of AI. How often have you been in transit or at a party where you had to yell at your friend to hear you? With this, you should be able to talk naturally yet still clearly hear each other. Bonus points if it can work the other way around, i.e. mute a single person that is loud or annoying.
Since the team achieved this level of noise cancellation using off-the-shelf components, we assume some existing earbuds/ANC headphones could be upgraded to support this AI noise cancellation if the calculations are done on smartphones. For now, this peace-making device is still under development, and we don’t have any dates for retail availability. The sooner, the better.