[What if?] Remote controller to mute certain people
Hi guys,
Since I was a kid, I've always dreamed of a sort of remote controller that you could use to mute certain people around you (e.g. you're in the subway, a guy is yelling over the phone next to you preventing you to sleep, you click, and cannot hear his voice anymore).
Recently found back ideas on how to do it that I wrote in 10th grade but I don't think "becoming a wizard" fits well the reality of this.
With the progress of individual voice and voice patterns recognition, do you think it will be possible one day to wear a sort of hearing device able to single out a voice stream pertaining to a certain person, and internally cancelling it (or muting it) with noise cancellation techniques ?
I think this is composed of 3 sub-problems:
- Identifying the voice stream and the person - could potentially be done via advanced voice recognition, or maybe earlier if combining Machine vision (e.g. with connected glasses) that will identify the actual person, the distance from you, when he/she talks and from that create the voice profile of the person)
- Singling out the voice stream from whatever else you are hearing (almost like re-splitting a music by instrument track - no idea how to do this)
- Muting the voice without affecting the remaining sounds from the environment (i.e. we cannot use classic noise cancellation because it's based on a certain frequency, and hence will cancel all other noises on that particular frequency)
The post is not to bring any actual product to life but more to fantasize about what could (in the future) enable this type of devices :) - and whether my childhood dream has some chance to become reality before 80 years !
Cheers guys !