AI Headphones Allow Wearer to Listen to One Person within a Crowd

A team of researchers from the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering have designed an artificial intelligence system that allows its user to listen to a specific person in a crowd, if they have the headphones on.

The system, dubbed Target Speech Hearing, enrolls a specific individual when the user looks at them for three to five seconds. Once this is done, the system blocks out all other sounds in the area and plays the voice of the enrolled speaker in real time. The system has been designed to work even when the user is no longer looking at the speaker.

The team showcased its findings at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which took place earlier this month in Honolulu. Professor Shyam Gollakota, senior author of this study, stated that the researchers developed artificial intelligence to alter the auditory perception of any individual wearing headphones for their project.

He explained that the device allowed users to hear one speaker clearly when the user was in a noisy environment surrounded by other individuals talking. To use the Target Speech Hearing system, an individual wearing store-bought headphones with a microphone presses a button while facing the individual they  like to hear.

The sound waves from the voice of the speaker are captured by the microphone on the headset. It should be noted that there’s a 16⁰ margin of error. Once this is done, the headphones transmit that signal to an embedded computer where the machine-learning software learns the vocal patterns of the speaker.

The system is designed to focus on the voice of the speaker, playing it back to the user even as they move around.

For their project, the investigators tested the system on 21 subjects, who were asked to rate the clarity of the enrolled voice. On average, they rated the clarity of the filtered sound almost twice as high as the raw sound.

This project adds flesh to the group’s prior research on semantic hearing where subjects were asked to select certain sound classes that they wanted to listen to and block out other sounds in the surroundings.

Currently, the system can only enroll one speaker at a time and only when there’s one voice coming from the same direction as the speaker. The investigators are focused on expanding the system to hearing aids and earbuds. The system itself isn’t commercially available, but its code can be accessed by those who wish to build on it.

With more entities such as Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) engaged in their own AI R&D, the world is likely to see many more applications of this technology in various spheres of life and business.

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