PREVIEW

AI Headphones Let Wearer Listen To A Single Person In A Crowd By Looking At Them Just Once. Researchers have developed AI-powered headphones that allow users to focus on a single speaker in a noisy environment. By looking at a person for three to five seconds and pressing a button to record their speech the device filters out all other sounds, even while the user is walking around the room. The system called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real-time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker. To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously. The University of Washington team presented its findings on May 14 in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The team is working to expand the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future.