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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

#111

Post by singingfish »

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…

The only advice on hearing aids is if you need them, get it diagnosed and intervened early. That way you get the cheapest and most reliable hearing aid that's going to work well for you.

Otherwise the stuff you described in your comment around attention filtering starts to happen because of the sensory loss. Therefore the longer you avoid hearing correction once your hearing starts to become impaired, the more complex and expensive a hearing aid you need to re-do. This is because these expensive hearing aids do a poor approximation of the things your brain/auditory cortex was doing prior to the sensory loss.

BRB - better go book a hearing test.

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

#112

Post by franga2000 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #69
vsnf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube's automatic captions do this for any word on an ambiguous blacklist. Not only is this annoying when reading the captions, but I imagine that for the hearing impaired, it would also be condescending to have Google tell you what you can and cannot read, especially since the hearing un-impaired experienced it just fine.

And then there's TikTok who will downrank your content if its AI catches you using words like "kill" or "suicide" [1]... and so, as many creators cross-publish on YouTube Shorts as well, it also automatically degrades the content there as the creators use "euphemisms" instead. And then young people snag that up and literally write that way on Reddit. No thanks, I don't want to hear or read "unalived" again. And for f…

The whole "unalive" thing started happening on US-based platforms even before TikTok existed, so blaming this on the CCP is either very ignorant or intentional misleading. Normal YouTube videos is where this started. Blame Google and their advertisers.

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

#113

Post by meindnoch »

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.

Microphone array beamforming: http://www.labbookpages.co.uk/audio/beamforming.html

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

#115

Post by nolok »

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!

For something that you could actually sell in volume, you may not be thinking large enough in terms of "party".

It's common to wear ear plugs at concerts, to avoid destroying your ears. Not imagine replacing those ear plugs with in-ear headphones that filter everything except your family/friends and the concert, while regulating the volume (if your SO talks to you make that one voice loud over the rest), maybe keep the "crowd noise" going with the flow but remove normal conversations for people around, etc ...

I'm not in ML/AI/etc ... At all but my understanding is that none of that is actually impossible with current tech ? Sure the battery and power limits exists, but this is a concert those headphone with a "band" going behind your head to keep them in place / not lose them if it falls makes sense. Would need some training for "your voice" but if alexa can do it in 10 seconds then a phone app can do that too.

Hell, if it existed for movies theater at below 200€ I would probably buy one right now and maybe go to the movies again.

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

#116

Post by 72deluxe »

eisbaw wrote: post #59

aka beam-forming. No AI needed, just good mics.

If you watch the second half of the video, it still picks up the person when they're not facing them (walking around a fountain), so it's only used to target the person for the initial capture.

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

#118

Post by consp »

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…

> It's an accessibility nightmare, especially (but not only) for people with hearing loss.

I can't make out any conversation in a noisy environment so usually switch to try-to-filter-noise-and-fail plus some amateur form of lip reading which works ok for a casual conversation but not for a more serious one. Hearing is "ok" enough though when testing, so no clue what it is.

It helps a lot when the ambient noise level reduced by a few db and tuning down the music helps a lot.

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

#119

Post by swiftcoder »

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?

Folks who are hearing impaired do. And that's increasingly more of us as we age.

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

#120

Post by sebzim4500 »

hfjtifkenf wrote: post #57
gexla wrote: post #56

They couldn't use this to listen to me. They would just get "I am just a large language model, I can't help you with that." I use a lot of curse words. ;)

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.

Interesting since in their model spec OpenAI [1] suggests that for translation they should basically let you do whatever.

[1] https://cdn.openai.com/spec/model-spec-2024-05-08.html#excep...

EDIT: I got a translation but it lectured me first (and I'm not convinced the translation is accurate) https://chatgpt.com/share/10c63fad-4716-4cde-885d-a681c7cb78...

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