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LiveScience
Keumars Afifi-Sabet

These noise-canceling headphones can filter specific sounds on command, thanks to deep learning

Scientists have designed the AI-embedded software so it can work with different kinds of noise-caneling headphones. (Image credit: Witthaya Prasongsin via Getty Images)

Scientists have built noise-canceling headphones that filter out specific types of sound in real-time — such as birds chirping or car horns blaring — thanks to a deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm.

The system, which researchers at the University of Washington dub "semantic hearing," streams all sounds captured by headphones to a smartphone, which cancels everything before letting wearers pick the specific types of audio they'd like to hear. They described the protoype in a paper published Oct. 29 in the journa IACM Digital Library.

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