Before splurging on a pair of premium headphones or earbuds, people often have concerns over two key factors – noise isolation and transparency. Active Noise Cancellation essentially tries to block all external noise so that you only hear what the audio drivers are blasting inside your ear canal, while transparency allows limited passthrough of ambient sound while still listening to music. So far, the likes of Apple and Sony have done a terrific job at it, but no audio gear lets you focus on a single source of external sound.
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What if you only want to hear what a single person is saying in a room full of other people? The experts over at the University of Washington have developed an AI-driven kit for headphones that lets you look at a person for three to five seconds as a directional signal, and the headphones will only allow their voice to pass through. The team calls it “Target Speech Hearing” and it works even if the listener is moving around and no longer sitting directly in front of the speaker.
“In this project, we develop AI to modify the auditory perception of anyone wearing headphones, given their preferences. With our devices you can now hear a single speaker clearly even if you are in a noisy environment with lots of other people talking,” says Professor Shyam Gollakota from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
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