A new AI can focus on one voice in a crowd
The program can identify and suppress background noise using both visual and audio cues
Much like someone listening to a conversation at a crowded party, a new artificial intelligence can tune out background noise in videos to hear what a particular person on screen is saying.
Humans are naturally good at focusing on specific voices amidst the din — a phenomenon known as the cocktail party effect (SN Online: 4/29/14). But until now, programs designed to listen for specific speakers in noisy audio tracks have struggled to mimic humans’ selective mental muting. The new AI is designed to use both audio and visual cues, such as mouth movements, to separate sounds produced by different speakers in videos.