At CES 2024, OrCam Technologies introduced the OrCam Hear device, an AI-driven assistive technology for individuals with hearing impairment.
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AI hearing concept
Powered by AI technology and proprietary voice enhancement deep learning models, OrCam Hear isolates the voices of distinct speakers using their voice signatures. It seamlessly amplifies the targeted speakers, while effectively removing other voices and ambient noise for an unparalleled audio experience.
OrCam Hear enables people to overcome the difficulty to understand speech in noisy situations, known as the "cocktail party problem", a well-recognised challenge for traditional hearing aids. This overwhelming cacophony can lead to avoidance of social situations, which impacts overall quality of life. The OrCam Hear helps people who are hard of hearing to discern and focus on specific voices in various social situations.
The OrCam Hear’s EarBuds and a mobile phone dongle are controlled by an app available for iPhone. After sampling the selected voices for a few seconds, using AI, the app creates a unique speaker profile that encapsulates the voice signature for each of the speakers. This allows users to selectively isolate specific voices even in noisy environments.
The OrCam Hear user can select the members of the conversation by turning each speaker "on"/"off" accordingly, with a single tap, enabling effective muting all other voices and ambient noise.
Prof. Amnon Shashua, OrCam’s co-founder, said: “The use of deep networks plus the latest network architectures large language models are harnessed to make a game changing experience for hearing aids and hearables in general. The problem of “speech in noise” or commonly called the “cocktail party problem” in academic literature has been a very difficult problem to tackle at a product level. Moving from an academic demonstration to a seamless product took years to perfect.”
