181–190 of 452 posts
Next can we have them identify ambient noises that need amplification for safety reasons, like the nearly-silent electric car about to run me over, or the bike I'm about to accidentally step in front of? As someone who spends a bit too much of my time walking around on calls, I think selective amplification of ambient sounds for safety would be amazing!
During the first aborted product effort to develop headphones, we were looking at a conceptual feature similar to this - selectively allowing people’s voices through the ANC chipset.
I don’t recall the exact approach the DSP folks were using (I was closer to the hardware for ANC) but they were really only able to figure out how to isolate the wearer’s voice by virtue of that signal having more power than all the others.
This is terribly cool. I wonder what other kinds of fun you could have with headphones. ANC chipsets are incredibly powerful and I’d wager their capabilities are not even close to fully tapped.
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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…
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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?
If the size could shrink to the size of a small earplug, I'd love to use this as a person who is not hearing-impaired (at least they couldn't diagnose me with it, so now I'm not sure if their diagnostics sucks, or I'm just a normal person and others pretend better that they hear everything well) . In groups and with friends, it's inevitable that you end up in a busy restaurant or a bar, and it always frustrates me th…
After a whole day of tests the audiologist comes in and says I have good news and bad news and good bad news. The good news is that my hearing was beyond great, it was at the level of a 5 year old. The bad news: I could hear so well I was unable to differentiate sound; my hearing hadn’t gotten worse, my brain’s ability to separate sound had. The good bad news is that my hearing would inevitably deteriorate, as all ours does, and for several years I’d be able hear in public places!
I think part of what has made this worse is that restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound. Most bars opened in the last 15 years have cement floors, very little sound insulation, and they’re based on the idea that you’re not having a good time unless your ears are ringing.
I’ve stopped patronizing these places if only because I literally cannot maintain conversations.
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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 phonak HAs have some directional noise cancellation (or biasing at least; I don't have rigorous definitions for these terms)... It helps but isn't great. Has a problem that I think the AI headphones wouldn't solve either: in a (non-quiet) group setting you still need to anticipate who's going to speak when and look at them for best results. The direction bit is just biasing to preferring forward stuff (via two mic…
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 French youtuber Deus Ex silicium made a through analysis. Basically, hearing aids are slightly worse than ordinary wireless headphones, but 10 times more expensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPmwfbLPHG8
I wonder if some constructors could target this use-case by making aids that are very easy to self-calibrate.
On the other hand, the median hearing aid user is pretty old, has lots of disposable money and has never watched a youtube tutorial in their life, so it might be a small market.
If the size could shrink to the size of a small earplug, I'd love to use this as a person who is not hearing-impaired (at least they couldn't diagnose me with it, so now I'm not sure if their diagnostics sucks, or I'm just a normal person and others pretend better that they hear everything well) . In groups and with friends, it's inevitable that you end up in a busy restaurant or a bar, and it always frustrates me th…
I could not hear anyone in any crowded situation. At middle age I thought my hearing was leaving. Yet every audiologist I went to said my hearing was fine. So I found the best audiologist in my fairly large metro area, and scheduled a year in advance (the wait list was that long). After a whole day of tests the audiologist comes in and says I have good news and bad news and good bad news. The good news is that my hea…