AI Solves the 'Cocktail Party Problem' and Proves Useful in Court

upstart writes:

In groups people screen out chatter around them - and now technology can do the same:

It's the perennial "cocktail party problem" - standing in a room full of people, drink in hand, trying to hear what your fellow guest is saying.

In fact, human beings are remarkably adept at holding a conversation with one person while filtering out competing voices.

However, perhaps surprisingly, it's a skill that technology has until recently been unable to replicate.

And that matters when it comes to using audio evidence in court cases. Voices in the background can make it hard to be certain who's speaking and what's being said, potentially making recordings useless.

Electrical engineer Keith McElveen, founder and chief technology officer of Wave Sciences, became interested in the problem when he was working for the US government on a war crimes case.

"What we were trying to figure out was who ordered the massacre of civilians. Some of the evidence included recordings with a bunch of voices all talking at once - and that's when I learned what the "cocktail party problem" was," he says.

"I had been successful in removing noise like automobile sounds or air conditioners or fans from speech, but when I started trying to remove speech from speech, it turned out not only to be a very difficult problem, it was one of the classic hard problems in acoustics.

"Sounds are bouncing round a room, and it is mathematically horrible to solve."

The answer, he says, was to use AI to try to pinpoint and screen out all competing sounds based on where they originally came from in a room.

This doesn't just mean other people who may be speaking - there's also a significant amount of interference from the way sounds are reflected around a room, with the target speaker's voice being heard both directly and indirectly.

In a perfect anechoicchamber - one totally free from echoes - one microphone per speaker would be enough to pick up what everyone was saying; but in a real room, the problem requires a microphone for every reflected sound too.

[...] And, he adds: "We knew there had to be a solution, because you can do it with just two ears."

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