An AI headphone system has been developed that allows you to hear only the voice of the person you are talking to by simply staring at them for a few seconds and registering their voice.
In recent years, the number of earphones and headphones equipped with 'noise canceling' that picks up ambient noise with a built-in microphone and cancels the noise by hitting the opposite phase waveform has increased. In addition, some earphones such as AirPods Pro are equipped with a function that detects when the wearer is talking and automatically adjusts the volume. A research team at the University of Washington announced that they have developed a system that 'only picks up the sound of the person you are talking to by having the user look at the person wearing the headphones for a few seconds and register it .'
Look Once to Hear: Target Speech Hearing with Noisy Examples - CHI '24
AI headphones let wearers listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once | UW News
https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/05/23/ai-headphones-noise-cancelling-target-speech-hearing/
You can see what the developed headphone system is like by watching the movie below.
AI headphones filter out noise so you hear one voice in a crowd - YouTube
These are the headphones equipped with the new system.
The noise-canceling headphones have a small microphone and button on each ear.
It's very easy to use. First, look directly at the person you're talking to.
While looking directly at the person you're talking to, press the button on the ear cup to register your voice.
The way it works is very simple: when you look directly at the person you're talking to, the distance from their mouth to the microphones mounted on each ear cup is equal.
When you press the button, the built-in AI determines that the voice coming from the microphones at equal distances from both ears is the 'voice of the person you're talking to' and analyzes the waveform. Then, by canceling out sounds other than that waveform, you can pick up only the voice of the person you're talking to.
This system is useful in noisy places such as the sound of a fountain, as shown below.
Just by staring at the other person and pressing a button, the other person's voice is registered and becomes easier to hear. However, since only one person can be registered at a time, it is not possible to apply this to conversations with multiple people at the time of writing.
This AI headphone system is not commercially available at the time of writing, and a proof-of-concept experiment was just released at an academic event held on May 14, 2024. The research team aims to implement it in wireless earphones and hearing aids in the future.
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