New earbuds give you super-hearing
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2971267/wearables/new-earbuds-give-you-super-hearing.html
Listen to this: The world of earbuds is about to be transformed by startups whose products let you customize what you hear.
Instead of earbuds, which typically deliver music and voice sounds through a wire, and hearing aids, which boost certain frequencies (lost to the elderly who listened to loud music through earbuds in their misspent youths), the new
hearables -- wearable devices that live in your ears -- enable the customization of environmental sound. You can cherry-pick which noises you want to hear better, and which you want silenced.
Hearable devices will give us hands-free, instant access to our virtual assistants -- Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Alexa and others. And our interactions with the
artificial intelligence assistants of the future will be enhanced by the biometric-reading capabilities our hearable devices, such as the ability to detect voice stress patterns. Siri and the gang will know our emotional state and respond appropriately.
This new generation of hearables will transform the phone call. One-on-one, in-person conversations will be converted to digital signals and processed just like phone calls are now.
The act of raising a smartphone to one's ear will become obsolete. We'll just tell our virtual assistant who to connect to, and we'll be instantly connected to the person or group we want. A conversation with a friend in a noisy restaurant or in another city will involve the exact same process: We'll simply connect to or isolate that person's voice no matter where they are and just talk. And we won't have to worry about interrupting others, because nearby strangers will be able to tune us out.
The first wave of hearable devices is just the beginning of something wonderful.
Within a few years, intelligent wireless in-ear computers will be able to process all the sound coming in, then customize it for us in real time. And they'll give us an invisible and direct connection to our A.I. assistants and an internet of information and communication like we've never experienced. They'll monitor our vitals and network with our other bodily and personal gadgets, our homes and the Internet of Things devices in our environment.
