Pioneering assistive hearing tech showcased at CES 2024

At CES 2024, OrCam Technologies is showcasing its AI-driven assistive technology with hearing impairments, the OrCam Hear.

Taking place annually and organised by organised by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of the largest global stages for companies to showcase their latest and greatest technology innovations.

The show covers a wide variety of sectors including automotive, robotics, gaming, wearables, sports technology, and accessibility. It is also a chance to discover some of the latest assistive technology advancements.

CES 2024 takes place on 9-12 January in Las Vegas, USA.

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, the firm underlines.

OrCam Hear enables people to overcome the difficulty to understand speech in noisy situations, known as the “cocktail party problem”. The assistive device helps people who are hard of hearing to discern and focus on specific voices in various social situations.

OrCam Hear’s EarBuds and a mobile phone dongle are controlled by a dedicated 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 cofounder, explained: “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.”

At the CES 2020 Best of Innovation Awards, OrCam Hear won an award in the ‘Accessibility’ category.