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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

#221

Post by 100721 »

HPsquared wrote: post #143
gravescale wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lea…

It's depressing to think of the different ways people are treated like livestock on a factory farm.

It's depressing to think of the different ways livestock are treated like livestock on a factory farm, too.

Factory farms are hell on earth.

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

#222

Post by SamBam »

j1elo wrote: post #193
totetsu wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are these passive directional earplugs https://www.flareaudio.com/pages/earhd

The prospect of an earplug that eases focusing audio got me interested... but no thanks, I won't go out to socialize with basically two mini trumpets coming out of my ears. It looks funny, reminiscing of classic b&w pictures with deaf people carrying ear trumpets everywhere with them during 18th century.

I was agreeing with you, but then I watched the video of Stephen Fry and I felt that they just looked like beats earbuds, which people have normalized wearing.

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

#223

Post by mhb »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #142
andrelaszlo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. It's an accessibility nightmare, especially (but not only) for people with hearing loss. I thought it's well established that they're doing it entirely on purpose. Restaurants, cafes and bars don't make money on you chilling out and having a good time with friends; they make money on you buying food and drinks. T…

This explanation doesn't really work for the cafes that allow people to take up space at tables for long periods just guilt-ordering a minimal amount.

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

#224

Post by wintermutestwin »

mozman wrote: post #204
superultra wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t go to bars very often anymore but I absolutely detest live music. I go with friends to talk. Not to have loud music prevent a conversation.

Ironically, I think most of my hearing loss is from people trying to talk to me while I was listening to a band.

If the band is playing zip it!

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

#225

Post by RobotToaster »

superultra wrote: post #185
serial_dev wrote: post #162

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…

Auditory processing disorder?

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

#226

Post by throwup238 »

HPsquared wrote: post #143
gravescale wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lea…

It's depressing to think of the different ways people are treated like livestock on a factory farm.

At least livestock gets to grow up in pasture before they’re sent to the feedlots.

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

#227

Post by jeffhuys »

withinboredom wrote: post #68
fragmede wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much latency is acceptable? If you're off in the woods somewhere far from the cloud, sure, but it's less than 10ms to ping Google.com for me, and if the speech-to-text engine runs faster than realtime, I don't see why processing remotely is a problem. 10 ms is nothing. Still, the transcription part is already here today. The Google Translate app has a transcribe app that does this (runs locally; does not do magic…

> If you're off in the woods somewhere far from the cloud, sure, but it's less than 10ms to ping Google.com for me I'm in one of the biggest cities of my current country, and the RTT to google from me is 87-91ms. Well over 4 million people live within 100km of me, so I suspect they see similar latencies. On my cell, I see 191-207ms.

That’s a shockingly high latency for a major city! Getting 3ms to google.com here, big city in the Netherlands. Probably close to a data center.

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

#228

Post by spacebanana7 »

spi wrote: post #137
nolok wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even putting 50db of sound in the opposite direction might help take something from the volume of a nightclub to the volume of a refrigerator [1]. Not perfectly muting it, but perhaps good enough for many scenarios.

Disclaimer - I also have no technical experience of sound

[1] Going by the sounds levels in this post: https://lexiehearing.com/us/library/decibel-examples-noise-l...

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

#229

Post by josefresco »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #151
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…

> they are deeply expensive Like, $50,000. I'm hoping that removing the need for prescription ones, will allow the price to go down significantly. As an older person, I have noticed that my hearing has gotten "louder," over the years. I still hear dB levels fine. The problem is that I hear all the noise. I used to be able to hold conversations in loud environments (like bar/restaurants), being able to hear the other…

My dad just got hearing aids (US) about 3 weeks ago. They cost him $1600 with no insurance coverage.

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

#230

Post by RhysU »

wanderingstan wrote: post #210
superultra wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ...restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound. Theory: The bars and restaurants want young patrons, so the poor acoustics are a selection mechanism. Only young people can converse there, so older folks stay away. The place gets reputation as “young and hip.” Whether by conscious design or “natural selection” for establishments, this seems to be the case.

Designers for bars and clubs will take the clientele into account in subtle sensory ways. One once told me how he designed a club known to cater to those having trysts-- it had many isolated booths where the lighting prevented seeing into the booths from the main areas.
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