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Comment by Kamq | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't that just make the party louder as well, resulting in the same situation?

Or am I just being really dumb?

I have a similar issue which I learned to live with by avoiding very loud environments (lots of people talking in a tight indoor setting). I sometimes mishear dialogue while watching movies and have to rewind here and there. However, when listening using headphones the problem goes away almost entirely. The amplification seems to help in this case. Similarly in semi crowded environments it should help as well. It never bothered me enough to try hearing aids but if barriers to acces dissapear Im willing to give it a try. OTC and prescriptionless should help since I don’t have a medical insurance at the moment.

I think they want a hearing aid that could selectively amplify just one voice. Maybe the loudest voice in the vicinity, for example, while muting the others. Not sure how feasible it would be to do this in real time, though.

AirPods Pro can do that:

Conversation Boost for AirPods Pro helps you better hear conversations in crowded or noisy environments. Through computational audio and beamforming microphones, Conversation Boost focuses AirPods Pro on the voice of the person directly in front of you, making it easier to distinguish speech and follow along in face‑to‑face conversations.

I always wanted to have those helicopter helmets when in a loud restaurant/bar. I don’t talk the loudest and those places are just so annoying.

Yeah same this is one thing about Miami that is a bit obnoxious, I'm just minding my own business blowing off steam at happy hour somewhere and like so many normal city bar type spots have like a DJ set up and I wanna be like "hello sir or madam, my phone decibel meter indicates that this is way too loud." ~points to spectrogram on phone screen flashing 97~

I have AirPods Pro's and they are very disappointing. My pair of $500 hearing aids are far superior. The AirPods provide no gain for external sound, and not nearly enough equalization to compensate for hearing loss. The "beam forming" effect is nearly non-existent. I have a pair of Bose Hearphones (sadly no longer sold), and those really had effective directional capability.

Apple has all the tech needed to get this done, even in their existing product. I'm hopeful they will now feel they can release it. All I need is compression (amplification of soft sounds without over-amplification of loud sounds), equalization, and an app that allows me to make the necessary adjustments - with separate controls for exterior sound and the iOS audio chain.

I'm betting they'll come up with something "good enough" eventually. The pending Pro supposedly has significantly improved audio capabilities so that may help make it happen.

I don’t think it needs to selectively amplify just one voice, it just needs to quiet down the background noise.

For reference I had a friend whose hearing aids were doing this 15-20 years ago. He was able to have a conversation just fine in a crowded bar, whereas I couldn’t hear a thing over the din of background conversation.

> Wouldn't that just make the party louder as well, resulting in the same situation?

If everyone was using a naive version of what's described: maybe?

If only a handful of people were using it: probably not.

And I'm sure you could exploit human psychology to engineer some way to keep the party as quiet on average as before.

(Slightly related, I heard of some gadget that projects someone's speech back at them with a slight delay. The effect is said to be so unnerving that untrained people stop talking altogether, or only haltingly. It's apparently been used to shut down protestors.)

> some gadget that projects someone's speech back at them with a slight delay

I wonder if it would be more disconcerting with a varying delay. Long ago I saw a proposal to eliminate "feedback" in a Public Address system by putting in a delay line with variable delay.

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