Google Australia partners to personalise AI hearing tech

Google Australia has announced five new partnerships with Australian hearing leaders to pave the way for more personalised AI hearing technology.

The collaboration is part of Google’s Digital Future Initiative and will see Google join forces with Cochlear, Macquarie University Hearing, National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL), NextSense and The Shepherd Centre to explore new applications of AI and machine learning hearing solutions.

Research will focus on enhancing hearing technologies to overcome current challenges and pave the way for more personalised hearing health care — with the goal to provide a brighter future for more than 1.5 billion people globally who have hearing loss.

For over 75 years, NAL has set global standards to assess hearing impairment and develop hearing healthcare innovations for clinicians and those with hearing difficulty. Through NextSense, Australia has one of the world’s largest and most established cochlear implant programs.

As part of the project, Simon Carlile, a world leader in the field, will join Grace Chung and Peter Bartlett — who lead Google’s first Australian research hub, Google Research Australia — to steer the effort on the ground and continue Australia’s proud record of hearing innovation.

The first project will seek to personalise hearing models to better address individual listening needs to enhance hearing aids and other listening devices.

This project will explore new applications of AI to better identify, categorise and segregate sound sources. Ultimately, this might make it easier for people using assistive listening devices to follow a conversation or activity as the technology could help to prioritise sounds, such as a person speaking — and filter out others, such as background noise.

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