Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through

That complexity is a problem when AI models need to work in real time in a pair of headphones with limited computing power and battery life. To meet such constraints, the neural networks needed to be small and energy efficient. So the team used an AI compression technique called knowledge distillation. This meant taking a huge AI model that had been trained on millions of voices (the "teacher") and having it train a much smaller model (the "student") to imitate its behavior and performance to the same standard. The student was then taught to extract the vocal patterns of specific voices from the surrounding noise captured by microphones attached to a pair of commercially available noise-canceling headphones.