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The blurring of lines between audio and health devices seems to be a trend across the industry. “We really want to make sure we care about our customers’ hearing,” says Mika Tikander, Head of Audio at Helsinki-based Bang & Olufsen. Tikander points out Recent data About the decline in hearing health in young people and reports that there is a significant focus from manufacturers on prenatal care and hearing health in AES headphone technology Conference in Espoo, Finland, next August.
“Apple has a lot of progress in this area,” he says. “We want to make sure that our headphones can adapt, and make that choice (in terms of when to block out sound) for you, if you allow it of course. Some people don’t like that idea, but if there’s a noisy event in your surroundings, the headphones can take care of it, just adjust it a little bit and get you back to normal listening once you’re away from that noise.”
Enter “sound bubble”
Hearvana AI is one startup looking to go much further than the AirPods’ current suite of noise cancellation and ambient noise features. Co-founded by Shyam Gollakota, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malik Itani and Toshao Chen, Hervana recently raised $6 million in a joint venture. Pre-seed round Which only included Amazon’s Alexa box.
One of the startup’s first big innovations was “semantic hearing,” the first project the company tackled about three years ago. The team built a prototype hardware — a pair of headphones with six microphones via the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller — to test a model that was trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birds chirping, babies crying, alarm clocks, pets and people talking, and then allowed the user to isolate the voice of one person for example as a ‘point of light’, blocking out all other frequencies.
“So I’m going to the beach and I want to only listen to the sounds of the ocean, not people talking next to me, or I’m vacuuming the house but I still want to hear people knocking on the door or important sounds, like a baby crying,” explains Gollakota, who is based in Seattle. “That’s what we solved first. That was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and knocking on a door. It sounds very different, doesn’t it?”