The system was tested on 21 subjects who rated the clarity of the enrolled speaker's voice nearly twice as high as the unfiltered audio. Currently, the system can only enroll one speaker at a time and struggles when there is another loud voice coming from the same direction as the target speaker. The team is working on expanding the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future. The research was funded by a Moore Inventor Fellow award, a Thomas J. Cabel Endowed Professorship, and a UW CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund.
Key takeaways:
- A team from the University of Washington has developed an artificial intelligence system called "Target Speech Hearing" that allows a user to focus on a single speaker's voice in a noisy environment.
- The system works by having the user "enroll" a speaker by looking at them for three to five seconds, after which the system cancels all other sounds and plays only the enrolled speaker's voice.
- The system was tested on 21 subjects who rated the clarity of the enrolled speaker's voice nearly twice as high as the unfiltered audio on average.
- The team is working to expand the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future.