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Comment by gostsamo | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine being stuck for hours with loud and obnoxious human being who thinks that they are in their right to explain all of their work and family problems to the entire airplane? I hope airlines will forbid such behavior but it might be time to buy noise suppressing headphones for the gun silencers are not allowed on board.

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> Can you imagine being stuck for hours with loud and obnoxious human being who thinks that they are in their right to explain all of their work and family problems

That describes the current situation in lots of everyday setups, like waiting room in a clinic, bus, train…

Sometimes I wish the world was more like Japan in that regard…

I almost always wish that in almost every regard :)

Can you imagine being stuck for hours with loud and obnoxious...

Yes, which is why I never get on an airplane without headphones/earbuds. Seems simple enough to solve this problem at the receiving end.

I can guarantee that even top of the line noise cancelling headphones do not obscure a conversation happening next to me. The only way to drown out enough noise is to raise the volume to an uncomfortable-to-me level.

If you are lucky enough that you can be in comfort and noise-isolated from earbuds or headphones, I envy you.

Seems like a use case for AI right here; just have the user 'talk' silently, mouthing the words or in a very quiet whisper. I assume AI can read lips pretty well by now right? So turn on your video, have the AI already know how to synthesize your voice, and then just careful mouth the words into the camera. An AI model should be able to live-synthesize your voice that matches what you want to say and I think there would be minimal latency, not any worse than other video conferencing latency. And with headphones on, nobody on the plane can hear the other side, or you. And you could get a live transcript visible to you as well, so you could know if the AI made a mistake in reading your lips and you could correct it.

Might look weird but shrug.

AI can read lips better than humans. Unfortunately, lip reading isn't really possible. Too much ambiguity and way too hard to do it in a recognizable way while not making any sounds.

To disambiguate, the person on the plane could learn to use hand signals (e.g., Cued Speech) and the AI model can be trained on that.

I can't tell if this is an oblique reference to keyboards or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech

You mean what already existed 20 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfone

> Can you imagine being stuck for hours with loud and obnoxious human being

You just accidentally made the case for WFH :)

I'm not calling you sensitive because this also upsets me but... "get over it"?

There's no law that says somebody can't take a phone call or a conference on a bus. A plane is just a bus in a sky ("public transportation")

Are they being kind of rude/selfish? Sure. Are you being kind of rude to say "you can't do this thing you want to do because it's an inconvenience to me"?

There's also no law against me belting out some opera classics on the plane while my 6 year old accompanies me on the violin I got them for christmas.

But the pleasure it brings the two of us might be outweighed by the displeasure of the other 500 people on the plane.

There aren't specific laws about this, but the law does allow for private businesses, and even public services to set rules around behavior.

There likely is a rule about being disruptive on a bus (or airplane), and it is within the law to enforce those rules.

Acela does have the quiet car.

Many more people do sleep on planes than busses.

And a business can decide they no longer wish to serve a specific customer.

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