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

washington.edu

271–280 of 452 posts

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

#272

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've taken to wearing bone-conductors waaaaay to much, and I'm impressed with their flexibility for stuff like this. They keep my ears open, but when I need to hear the headset more clearly (like if I'm in a crowded area and taking a call) I can plug my ear with my finger and that both improves the audio quality of the bone conductor (it creates a speaker cabinet in your ear for a much fuller sound) and blocks out the outside noise. If you need full headphone-quality you put in ear-plugs. And they're pretty small and discrete.

They're not perfect, but the fact that I can move smoothly from "I need my ears open but still want to hear my headset" to "I need to block out sound and hear my headset perfectly clearly" with just a finger or a pair of earplugs is great.

Stick a shotgun mic (that's the term for a mic with tight directional cone, right? Not an audio guy) on the side and this would be really cool.

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

#273

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…

I patronize them - from a distance.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked Claude to help me learn to play a Pixies song on guitar and it would only give generic advice. Even when I asked for just the strumming pattern it refused due to copyright restrictions. I’m pretty sure a human guitar teacher would have not problem with helping me with that.

Questionable at best to consider copyright in this case but not when generating images.

Damn, that's a great point.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is, in fact, not always common. I guess it probably depends on the country/region to some extent.

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

#276

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…

That's utterly insane, and I suspect probably some outlier particularly expensive ones. You can book a fitting, and buy a choice of hearing aids, get trained, follow up, and 5 years worth of checks ups and appointments in London privately with no insurance ranging from ca $1300 to $5000. I've not even found any higher than $5k when I searched for prices in London, though I'm sure some of the Harley Street clinics will be willing to overcharge at ridiculous rates too.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect many of them. I was shocked, when I found out. Of course, you aren’t just paying for the hardware. You are also paying for all the medical stuff surrounding the kit. You can understand why vested interests fought so hard to prevent making hearing aids OTC. Like I said, I suspect that gravy train may have derailed.

Maybe you're thinking about the costs of getting a cochlear implant? Having worn hearing aids for 3 decades (in the US), and not going cheap, the high end name-brand ones have always been about 4-6k for a pair. (and most of the time growing up, health insurance didn't cover it) From everything I've ever seen or in any conversation online, 50k is either a misremembered or made up number for BTE or in-the-canal hearing…

You are correct. I have a profoundly deaf friend with cochlear aids.

They are a lot more expensive.

Thanks so much for the comment.

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

#278

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…

Id say the hearing aids are impressive tech but also not as good as I would have thought them to be. My mother uses phonaks and they constantly give feedback or are scratchy sounds and has to go get the audiologist to adjust them.

Shes older so that might be part of the technical challenge with them but i would have expected better given the huge price tag. Feels a bit like a monopoly running the development but that is merely a hunch.

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

#280

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…

Apple AirPods Pro are doing all of this now. They’ll isolate people in front of you, can reject background noise but allow voice, etc. They can also correct both music audio and “transparency” audio using your Audiogram. Unfortunately for me, they average both ears and perform the same correction on both ears and I have notable hearing loss only on one side.

I don’t see any reason proper hearing aids can’t already be doing it now though I am sure some of them are but probably the even more ridiculously priced $8k+ models.

Nuheara is also in this space but marketed and designed more specifically to be a low budget hearing aid replacement. With a similar pride to AirPods Pro.

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