A new generation of hearing aids is coming. It will allow us to separate the voices from each other and amplify only one, the one we have chosen.
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Hearing aids capable of selecting voices! Until now, these were content to amplify all voices without distinction. In a restaurant, a bar or a slightly noisy party, it becomes hell. It’s very difficult to follow a conversation. The new generation will give a kind of superpower: choosing who we want to hear and who we prefer to leave in silence. This is possible thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. The device will do a sort of voice recognition to isolate the sound signature of a particular voice.
To choose this voice, you will first need to record it for at least 10 seconds. This is what will allow you to create your signature and then recognize it. The process works with several voices. There will be a small button on the earpiece to switch between pre-recorded voices, spouse, friends, children, etc. We will therefore not be able to arrive at a party, choose a person at random and only hear them. Your voice will first need to be pre-recorded. However, the device can switch to “directive” mode to amplify only what the person in front of you says. It’s a technology called SpeakerBeam. It is developed by scientists from the NTT company in Japan. We should gradually find it in hearing aids.
Hear better than with a natural ear?
Other researchers want to go even further, with hearing aids capable of imitating the behavior of the brain. Concretely, it will be enough to concentrate on a particular voice to amplify it, even better than a “good hearing person”. The device uses a sensor that will decode brain waves to determine what we want to hear. Several teams are working on it: French people as part of the European Cocoha project and Americans from Columbia University.
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A little more than one in four French people suffer from one form or another of hearing loss. For a long time, we didn’t really have anything better than ordinary amplifiers. Soon we will have truly intelligent hearing aids.