David Tcheng, co-founder of the start-up One Llama, was recently interviewed by MIT Online Review regarding the development of smartphone technology to alert people of audible threats. The new app is called Audio Aware and it alerts users wearing headphones to potential hazards that they might otherwise not hear. In his interview, Tcheng explains:
“It will work by listening through your smartphone’s microphone … constantly comparing what it hears to stored templates of alert sounds it needs to recognize. When a sufficient match, such as a car horn, is detected, it will cancel any audio you’re hearing and pipe in an amplified version of the sound it’s picking up, or perhaps a cartoon-like version of that sound that is easier to recognize.”
David is a research scientist in the Illinois Informatics Institute, and a graduate student in the Informatics PhD program. To read more about Audio Aware see the linked MIT Review article, or one of the following: