Filter unwanted noise with these AI-powered headphones
Summary
However, typical noise-cancelling failed to distinguish between unwanted background sounds and crucial information, leaving headphone users unaware of their surroundings. His team created a system for targeted speech hearing in noisy environments and developed AI-based headphones that selectively filtered out specific sounds while preserving others. “Imagine you are in a park, admiring the sounds of chirping birds, but then you have the loud chatter of a nearby group of people who just can’t stop talking,” said Gollakota. That is exactly what we set out to achieve with our system.” Gollakota and his team combined noise-cancelling technology with a smartphone-based neural network trained to identify 20 different environmental sound categories. This means the neural network algorithms must process sounds in real-time in under a hundredth of a second, which is what we achieved.” The team employed this AI-powered approach to focus on human speech.