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Amazon Patents Noise-Canceling Headphones That Could Automatically Turn Off When It Detects Certain Sound Patterns (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report via The Next Web: Noise-canceling headphones are great for tuning out the din around you when you just want to focus on listening to music or enjoy some peace and quiet. Unfortunately, they also mute sounds that you might need to hear -- like someone calling your name. Amazon has a pretty cool idea for solving that problem. It was recently granted a patent for headphones that not only cancel out noise, but also listen to specific sounds or phrases (like 'Hey Ben') and respond by automatically turning off the feature so the user can hear sound from their surroundings. That should make it safer for use in noisy environments where you might actually need to pay attention to the occasional alert, such as a construction site or an industrial facility. In addition, the headphones can also listen for phrases to turn noise canceling back on again, so the user can resume their listening experience hands-free.
Just sayin'.
Non DRM music being played shutting down!
Fast Fourier transform, dominant-frequency analysis, and so forth.
Imagine detecting sounds approaching, human voice, and other such things, and filtering them in or out. The sound of approaching vehicles gets let through.
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You'd think it would be a better idea to work in the opposite way like a welder's auto-darkening facemask works. It should let all sound through till it detects high dB levels or a certain level of white-ish noise and then instantly start cancelling and then disabling the cancelling feature when the noise or loud sounds stop.
Presumably they patented a specific way of achieving their idea, not the idea itself. Headlines need to be short so you can't take them literally to infer details like this.
I've yet to read a recent patent that only covers a way of achieving it. Most patents cover thousands of implementations. I've read software patents that cover billions of ways to achieve an idea. This effectively makes it a patent on the idea itself.
The noise cancelling effect needs to be in the headphones as you need very accurate specs for the headphone drivers, the background noise microphones and the exact distances between them.
Listening to background noise and disabling the noise cancelling could be done by a phone, but then you need a standard protocol for controlling the headphones, and the feature only works when you're using the phone. A lot of people with noise cancelling headphones will make use of them without any audio source attached, as just silence is a good break sometimes.
I've seen something to handle that, though I don't know if a patent was granted for it. Noise-cancelling headphones that only filter out certain sounds, or that switch on when a certain sound is detected, kind of like those automatic welding masks.
By the way, there's another damn patent that should not have been granted because nothing new was invented: we already have noise-cancelling headphones as well as stuff to detect certain sounds. Combining them in this way is clever, but not more than that. Worth a cookie, not a patent.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...