AI noise-cancelling headphones let you focus on just one voice. With prototype noise-canceling headphones, you can choose which background sounds to block out, focusing your attention on a single speaker by placing a “audio spotlight” on it. Traditional noise-cancelling headphones dampen undesirable noises, such as the rumble of a bus engine, but they can also muffle sounds we wish to hear because the technology completely blocks out some frequencies.
Recently, headphones that can filter out unpleasant noises while retaining others, independent of their frequency, have been developed by Shyam Gollakota of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues. Additionally, it may be trained to focus only on a certain person’s voice and block out background noise by pressing a button.
AI noise-cancelling headphones let you focus on just one voice. This is a form of Artificial Intelligence System
This week, the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association are hosting a joint symposium where the researchers will be presenting their prototype. The gadget makes use of a neural network, a form of artificial intelligence system that has been trained on numerous recordings of 20 distinct sound sources, such as birdsong, alarm clocks, and weeping babies. Each type of sound from an app has an on/off button that allows the user to control whether it plays through headphones or is blocked.
Ear Covering Microphones
(AI noise-cancelling headphones let you focus on just one voice)
Commercial headphones with a microphone affixed to the exterior of the housing covering each ear make up the prototype. These microphones pick up background noise and send it to a smartphone or a little Orange Pi microcontroller, which is where the neural network is installed. The adjusted audio feed is then sent to the headphones by this AI, which also eliminates any extraneous sounds. According to Gollakota, the technology might be integrated into a pair of headphones.
Similar to the AI used to separate distinct instruments and voices from a cacophonous mix during recording The Beatles’ 1970 album Let It Be, this technology enables filmmaker Peter Jackson to produce the documentary series The Beatles: Get Back.
Will help in Preventing Incidents
(AI noise-cancelling headphones let you focus on just one voice)
Although it took some time, the researchers managed to keep the neural network small and straightforward enough for a mobile device to operate quickly, which allows the prototype to process audio in just 8 milliseconds. This helps to prevent confusing pauses between events occurring and your hearing them.
According to Gollakota, the effect is similar to turning on a “audio spotlight” on a source of noise, which enables you to concentrate on it even in noisy and chaotic surroundings.
“The user has more control thanks to its additional features. Right now, we’re implementing the initial stages of augmenting human auditory perception, said Gollakota.
