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AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

washington.edu

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Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#101

Post by andrelaszlo »

KaiserPro wrote: post #92

One thing that the HN crowd should appreciate is just how expensive and shit hearing aids are. go and look the up the price, they are deeply expensive, even for basic "make it louder" type aids. Worse still, because they interfere with your ear, you tend to loose the ability to "steer" your hearing. This means that you can't tune out other conversations/noises or stuff. The one good side effect of facebook spending b…

Modern hearing aids are pretty cool. They've crammed in an amazing amount of features in a super tiny form factor, with a battery that lasts for a week even when using bluetooth.

My Phonaks have the ability to automatically switch programs to some extent, and to fine tune the program using a companion app.

I can function and even have conversations to some extent in noisy environments, something that would have been impossible for me with hearing aids from a decade or so ago. I'm very grateful for this of course.

The pair costs roughly $2000. Luckily, it's covered by the national healthcare system[0] (which I of course pay for through my taxes) so I end up paying $50 every five years or so.

I hope the advances in "AI" will make it possible to not just amplify and filter (even if it's in very clever ways) but to isolate and enhance/reconstruct voices in noisy environments.

Meanwhile, I hope the trend of playing louder and louder music in cafes, restaurants and bars dies out. It's an accessibility nightmare, especially (but not only) for people with hearing loss.[1]

0: https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/en/about-us/healthcare-for-vi...

1: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-lev...

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#102

Post by esperent »

gedy wrote: post #21
CodeCompost wrote: post #14

As somebody who is hearing impaired, a feature like this would be a Godsend for me! This feature should be integrated into hearing-aids ASAP! Shut up - no, actually - keep talking and take my money!

I have sensoneural hearing loss as well and fyi Bose Hearphones do have something a little like this with directional noise cancellation that helps a lot. They are discontinued but you can find them refurbished.

My Sony's have a "focus on voice" setting in the noise cancelling section of their app. Is it similar?

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#103

Post by latexr »

bdowling wrote: post #89
foreigner wrote: post #77

I'll bet they achieve commercial success with the reverse application. Imagine being able to mute that one obnoxiously loud person with an annoying voice at a party!

Being able to selectively mute people was an element in a couple of Black Mirror episodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#105

Post by doktrin »

gexla wrote: post #60
hfjtifkenf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked gpt to translate for me the lyrics of a recent popular song containing the word "puta" and it just refused "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that". When I insisted it just ended the conversation.

Right, it wouldn't help you if you wanted to do something like "overhear" tips from attendees of a meth cooking convention.

It probably should. The amount of ancillary and contextual information required to correctly distinguish between legal and illegal settings and application is invasively high.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#106

Post by Terr_ »

stubish wrote: post #38
CodeCompost wrote: post #14

As somebody who is hearing impaired, a feature like this would be a Godsend for me! This feature should be integrated into hearing-aids ASAP! Shut up - no, actually - keep talking and take my money!

And we almost all will be where you are now, if we live long enough. If you can pick out audio from individuals, you could also send it through speech recognition and subtitle real world conversations for when hearing is worse or not there at all. But it really needs mobile devices capable of doing the processing locally, as I think round trips to the cloud would make it less useful or potentially useless.

> And we almost all will be where you are now, if we live long enough.

And given the US healthcare system, somebody is gonna take all our money too, one way or another. :P

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#107

Post by KaiserPro »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #101
KaiserPro wrote: post #92

One thing that the HN crowd should appreciate is just how expensive and shit hearing aids are. go and look the up the price, they are deeply expensive, even for basic "make it louder" type aids. Worse still, because they interfere with your ear, you tend to loose the ability to "steer" your hearing. This means that you can't tune out other conversations/noises or stuff. The one good side effect of facebook spending b…

Modern hearing aids are pretty cool. They've crammed in an amazing amount of features in a super tiny form factor, with a battery that lasts for a week even when using bluetooth. My Phonaks have the ability to automatically switch programs to some extent, and to fine tune the program using a companion app. I can function and even have conversations to some extent in noisy environments, something that would have been…

Those do look good, and in the last 3 years the price has dropped significantly. in the uk those cost about $3k, so not much difference. alas, they are not covered by the health service, only lesser ones.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#108

Post by unsupp0rted »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #101
KaiserPro wrote: post #92

One thing that the HN crowd should appreciate is just how expensive and shit hearing aids are. go and look the up the price, they are deeply expensive, even for basic "make it louder" type aids. Worse still, because they interfere with your ear, you tend to loose the ability to "steer" your hearing. This means that you can't tune out other conversations/noises or stuff. The one good side effect of facebook spending b…

Modern hearing aids are pretty cool. They've crammed in an amazing amount of features in a super tiny form factor, with a battery that lasts for a week even when using bluetooth. My Phonaks have the ability to automatically switch programs to some extent, and to fine tune the program using a companion app. I can function and even have conversations to some extent in noisy environments, something that would have been…

> I hope the advances in "AI" will make it possible to not just amplify and filter (even if it's in very clever ways) but to isolate and enhance/reconstruct voices in noisy environments.

I often see AI hopes expressed in this format. I would put it another way:

> I hope the advances in "AI" will make it possible to restore hearing to baseline average human level

Wishful thinking would be to enhance it beyond baseline. It's perfectly reasonable to think AI-advances can help researchers restore hearing in most cases, and reasonably within 10 years or so.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#109

Post by INTPenis »

amusingimpala75 wrote: post #53

How much is the AI necessary for this? At least for the targeting of sounds in the line of sight, that should be fairly easy to do without AI, but I don’t know about the human voice identification.

Directional mics were a toy 30 years ago, but an AI that can pick out a single voice and isolate it for you is quite the contemporary achievement.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#110

Post by aqme28 »

devjab wrote: post #78
foreigner wrote: post #77

I'll bet they achieve commercial success with the reverse application. Imagine being able to mute that one obnoxiously loud person with an annoying voice at a party!

I think this is the wildest “I guess I’m” old moment I’ve experienced… Do people wear headphones at parties?

I guess you’re not old enough. This sounds like a feature for hearing aids.
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