This Hearing Aid Can Translate For You–and Track Steps Too

It’s too loud for me to hear inside the Cupertino coffee bar, but Achin Bhowmik says it doesn’t bother him. He’s got a superpower, he says. If I look closely–very closely–I can see the tiny plastic tubes reaching from his ear canals to small devices hidden behind his ears. The hearing aids are running machine-learning algorithms that continuously monitor his "acoustic environment" to help him hear what he wants to hear. In the coffee shop, the devices decide this is a "speech in noise" situation, and automatically dampen the sound of background chatter and espresso machines, and focus four directional mics (two in each device) to amplify my voice instead.

They can even listen to another language and whisper a near real-time translation in your ear, Star Trek style.

Peter Burrows

https://www.wired.com/story/this-hearing-aid-can-translate-for-you/