Technology to mute people in real life

2023-09-26 22:15:39

On Discord, it is possible to adjust the sound level of the different participants in a voice room, to the point of making them mute. Have you always dreamed of doing the same in real life? So rejoice!

Picture the scene: you are in a noisy room chatting quietly with a friend. Unfortunately, with almost every sentence, you have to ask your interlocutor to repeat themselves because the noise prevents you from discerning what they are saying. If only you might silence everyone else present…

Well that might soon be possible! Indeed, researchers from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington are working on a technology that already exists on systems like Zoom or Discord: the reduction of parasitic noise. But not just any old way: it’s mainly regarding being able to isolate bits of conversation so that you can only choose to hear your interlocutors.

This will still require quite complex development, because this technology will take advantage of the space around you. So it will probably be a while before you can use it in your favorite restaurants and cafes.

How this “real-life noise isolator” works is a bit unusual: seven (or more) mini robots move around in space to isolate each conversation. Each of them are equipped with microphones and, using a method that can be described as echolocation, are able to locate themselves in space in order to identify voices in the place where they are, even if for At the moment, they are limited to locating space in two dimensions, without taking into account the height at which the person speaking is located, which means that, at this stage, they can only operate on a table.

The sound is then processed to isolate the elements that we want to hear, and everything is transmitted to a smart speaker located (if we understood it correctly, because this aspect of the demonstration is less clear) in one of the small robots cubic. The technology is still in development, but we can already see it in action in a demonstration video from researchers at the University of Washington. And it already seems to be working pretty well.

Bots already detect the right conversation 90% of the time, which is pretty impressive. For now, however, the number of people who can be isolated is still quite small: it would work with around four people talking at the same time at most.

There are still several obstacles that researchers will need to overcome in order to develop a viable and marketable version of this new technology. However, given the preliminary results, there is good hope of seeing these little cubic robots roaming our meeting rooms in the not too distant future.

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