Perfect for Spying, Right?

June 28, 2024

And we thought noise-cancelling headphones were nifty. The University of Washington’s UW News announces “AI Headphones Let Wearer Listen to a Single Person in a Crowd, by Looking at them Just Once.” That will be a real help for the hard-of-hearing. Also spies. Writers Stefan Milne and Kiyomi Taguchi explain:

“A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to ‘enroll’ them. The system, called ‘Target Speech Hearing,’ then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker. … To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there’s a 16-degree margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team’s machine learning software learns the desired speaker’s vocal patterns. The system latches onto that speaker’s voice and continues to play it back to the listener, even as the pair moves around. The system’s ability to focus on the enrolled voice improves as the speaker keeps talking, giving the system more training data.”

If the sound quality is still not satisfactory, the user can refresh enrollment to improve clarity. Though the system is not commercially available, the code used for the prototype is available for others to tinker with. It is built on last year’s “semantic hearing” research by the same team. Target Speech Hearing still has some limitations. It does not work if multiple loud voices are coming from the target’s direction, and it can only eavesdrop on, er, listen to one speaker at a time. The researchers are now working on bringing their system to earbuds and hearing aids.

Cynthia Murrell, June 28, 2024

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Privacy, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.