AI noise-cancelling headphones let you focus on just one voice

Prototype noise-cancelling headphones allow you to select which background noises to drown out, letting you put an "audio spotlight" on one specific voice so you can concentrate on it. Conventional noise-cancelling headphones reduce unwanted sounds like the rumble of a bus engine, but because the technology cancels out certain frequencies entirely, it can also suppress sounds we want to hear. Now, Shyam Gollakota at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues have created headphones that can remove any unwanted noises while leaving others intact, regardless of their frequencies. It can also be trained with the press of a button to home in on a specific person's voice and exclude all other noise. The researchers are presenting their prototype at a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association this week.