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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

#131

Post by willis936 »

INTPenis wrote: post #109
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.

Yeah I'm not really sure what's going on here. Sonar has been using ML classifiers for decades but afaik stream splitting with 100% confidence is currently considered magic. So what did they apply or what advance did they make? Afaict they threw some audio into a GPT blender without a closer look at what's being done.

Edit: I found the link to the paper. It isn't stream splitting so much as it is GPT-assisted beamforming estimation. Good stuff for sure.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642057

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

#132

Post by nkrisc »

darkwater wrote: post #128
consp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Same here. I have a (I think) very good ear in silent environments,for example I can hear a very faint sound at night, but I always struggled following conversations in music clubs or bar with high music volumes. I always end up nodding and saying "yeah yeah" even if I have no remote idea of what the other person is saying. Edit: but OTOH I see people having actual conversations in those same environments, so I guess…

My experience is exactly the same. I doubt everyone is simply pretending they have any idea what everyone else is saying, so it must be something wrong with me.

I’ve had my hearing tested. It’s within normal ranges across all frequencies tested. I have to assume it’s some kind of discrimination or processing difficulty in my brain.

I’ve noticed the same effect can be triggered even in a white environment by only two or three people trying to talk to me at the same time. I can’t understand anything any of them are saying and can’t listen to just one.

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

#133

Post by Wildgoose »

My daughter has an auditory impairment which she describes as "brain deaf".

Basically, her hearing is perfect but her brain struggles to process sound in a noisy environment; she can't single out what she is listening to.

This sounds perfect for her!

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

#134

Post by deadbunny »

darkwater wrote: post #128
consp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Same here. I have a (I think) very good ear in silent environments,for example I can hear a very faint sound at night, but I always struggled following conversations in music clubs or bar with high music volumes. I always end up nodding and saying "yeah yeah" even if I have no remote idea of what the other person is saying. Edit: but OTOH I see people having actual conversations in those same environments, so I guess…

Having worked (and frequented) loud bars and clubs for decades no one can hear anyone and just nods along.

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

#135

Post by andrelaszlo »

moffkalast wrote: post #126
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…

> you tend to loose the ability to "steer" your hearing Do people genuinely have that ability, to listen to a specific person and ignore the rest? Asking because no matter how hard I try I can never understand a fucking thing if there's many people talking loudly in the background, it all mixes together into an incoherent whole.

"Selective auditory attention is a normal sensory process of the brain, and there can be abnormalities related to this process in people with sensory processing disorders such as autism, attention deficit hyperactive disorder,[30] post traumatic stress disorder,[31] schizophrenia,[30] selective mutism,[32] and in stand-alone auditory processing disorders.[33]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_auditory_attention

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

#136

Post by gravescale »

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…

> Meanwhile, I hope the trend of playing louder and louder music in cafes, restaurants and bars dies out.

I don't hold out much hope because as far as I can tell it's done to make everyone "shut up and drink". I could believe it adds at least 50% to sales because when you can't hear a word anyone says, all you can do is smile and nod and take a swig. And if the place is already full anyway, they don't care if you leave, you'll be replaced. What matters is whoever is in there taking up a space is drinking as fast as possible.

Of course, people who get substantially drunk (which is to say, customers who spend) also don't care because they're not really listening closely or making conversational sense anyway and their pain tolerance is way up, so it's just a good time to them.

Even more cynically, it also keeps the place "cool" because all the old, past-it fogeys like me don't even bother going in. From this sample of one, someone who thinks the music is too loud is un-hip, isn't adding to any hookup appeal (either not in the market or pushing the creepy end of the age range) and won't even spend much because they can't get really hammered because the hangover will take them out for two days and they can't afford to lose a weekend.

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

#137

Post by spi »

nolok wrote: post #115
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 t…

I'm into AI but not into sound, so I might be saying something stupid here, but I think using something like this for very high volume like concerts would be possibly outright impossible, but, even if not, certainly quite dangerous and therefore not commercializable.

My understanding is that to "mute" a sound, you need to inject another wave that is exactly the opposite, with the exact same volume and in perfect sync, so that the two waves interfere destructively. However, in general but especially in AI, you can never guarantee 100% accuracy. If you use this technology to "silence" a background fountain, and something goes wrong, at worst you get a lot of noise that make you grimace and remove them. If at a concert with 100+ dB of music you get an error and your headphones start producing a similarly loud, but not perfectly aligned noise right into your ears, you probably won't have the time to remove them before damaging your hearing system.

In general, I think that having a tool that drives 100+ dB straight into your head is probably not a wise idea :-)

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

#138

Post by geros »

Wildgoose wrote: post #133

My daughter has an auditory impairment which she describes as "brain deaf". Basically, her hearing is perfect but her brain struggles to process sound in a noisy environment; she can't single out what she is listening to. This sounds perfect for her!

An audiologist described this to me as having an "audio processing disorder". Hope this helps.

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

#139

Post by bdw5204 »

In my experience, most people don't seem to understand the concept of noise cancelling headphones and will still try to talk to people who clearly can't hear them. I can't imagine it'd be any different for these AI headphones in practical use. Probably worse because the person you're actually trying to talk to might think you can't hear them.

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

#140

Post by Lio »

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…

Looking at Apple's Airpods Pro, they're starting to get some of the features of hearing aids. E.g. features to allow doorbells through the noise cancelling.

I don't think anyone would suggest them as a realistic choice today but I could see Apple going after that market and where Apple goes others follow.

Much like the market for prescription reading glasses has been eroded by off the self glasses.

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