Whether we are at home or work, we don’t really pay attention to the many sounds that surround us, and that we depend on to take action. Think of the microwave beeping – if it beeps, our food is cooked. If an infant is crying, we need to feed her or stop doing what we are doing and attend to her. Smoke alarms in the house or at work tell us something is burning.
These are some of the sounds that a lot of people depend on to take to take the next action, attend to chores, or just to be safe. Having said that, many of these sounds are not really accessible to deaf people. There isn’t an easy way for a deaf person to respond to sounds in a day to day setting, especially in a life threatening situation. To make daily sounds accessible to deaf people, a start up called Wavio is working on a device and an accompanying app that can capture sounds around a deaf person, figure out what that sound is, and notify them on their phone. The device, See Sound, is plugged into the wall socket around the house or workplace. When a sound occurs, See Sound captures it and first illuminates, and then its machine learning model predicts what it is with a certain confidence level. The user is immediately notified on their phone about the sound.
The always listening See Sound currently has a library of 75 unique household sounds, and its machine learning model has been trained using more than 2 million samples from YouTube. See Sound can also be customized so the user gets notifications for sounds that they consider more important.
See Sound is still under development and will hopefully be available very soon! Watch the video below to learn more about See Sound.
Source: NewzHook
See Sound Website: https://www.see-sound.com/#sound-process