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Justin Miller, CEO and co-founder of Nuheara, wearing his company's IQbuds assisted hearing ear buds. John Davidson
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by John Davidson
It's loud enough at the world's largest gadget fest, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
It's hard enough to hear yourself think, what with the sound of the 170,000 people, mostly Americans, who are expected to visit the show by the time it closes on Sunday, all of them yapping away to each other at the 3800 exhibition booths.
Just wait til everyone starts yapping into all of their devices, too, and all of those devices start yapping back. It's going to be deafening.
But if CES had a single theme in 2017 – and, in truth, it's way too big to have just one theme – it would be just that. There's going to be a whole lot more talking going on this year, and much of it will be people communicating with their machines and the machines talking back.
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GE's latest C table lamp has Amazon's Alexa voice assistant built in
As the machines get smarter, the big consumer electronics players such as Samsung and LG are pushing hard into voice interaction. Both those companies announced fridges, vacuum cleaners and robots you could talk to, some of which would talk back to you too. Samsung's new Family Hub 2.0 fridge (as well as upgraded versions of last year's model) will listen for commands such as "Hi Samsung, read me the recipe for chocolate cake" and will respond by reading the recipe. LG announced a similar fridge, which can be controlled by Amazon's voice-based virtual assistant, Alexa. It also has a robot that uses Alexa to control hifis, ovens and other appliances.
Alexa, Alexa everywhere
Alexa, which is expected to come to Australia this year as part of Amazon's move into the local market, was everywhere at CES. Ford announced a car that you can talk to, courtesy of Alexa. Lenovo showed off its Smart Assistant, a speaker with the Alexa system built into it just like Amazon's Echo speaker does. GE showed off a lamp, known as C, that you can talk to using Alexa.
And if everyday consumer electronics items are going to be making the world louder, then what better than consumer electronics to save us from all of that chatter?
Two Australian companies at CES, Nuheara and Dog & Bone, both showed off earphones that will either cut down on the chatter – Dog & Bone's Bluetooth earbuds, known as Earmade, come with a special dock that heats up the earbuds so they can be custom moulded to the shape of their owner's ear, for maximum noise isolation – or cut through the chatter, so you can focus your attention on the conversation in front of you.
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Dog & Bone's Earmade earbuds can be heated up and molded to the shape of your ear. (These ones haven't been.) John Davidson
Nuheara's Bluetooth earbuds, known as IQbuds, use sophisticated digital signal processing to calculate which voices in a crowd should be reduced in volume (and here in America, where citizens do like to talk loudly about nothing at all, that's almost all of them) and which ones should be amplified. If you're pub deaf, read on
This reporter interviewed the CEO and co-founder of Nuheara, Justin Miller, whilst testing out the IQbuds at a noisy CES booth, and either he started whispering the very moment I removed the buds from my ears (a trick he denied employing), or they do indeed make it dramatically easier to hold conversations in noisy environments, places where "pub deaf" people like me usually have to smile knowingly and pretend we have a single clue what's going on around us.
Nuheara isn't allowed to call the IQbuds "hearing aids" due to regulatory controls, and nor would they want to, says Miller. Working as hearing aids for the pub deaf is just one of their functions: the buds have audio profiles for all sorts of environments, where nearby voices need more or less amplification, and they can also be used as more regular Bluetooth earbuds, for listening to music playing on a mobile phone or to a video on a Bluetooth enabled TV.
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Nuheara's IQbuds with their charging case, and an Apple EarPod for comparison John Davidson
(20min delay)