ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS being used to create “hearing glasses” that use lip reading technology to help people with hearing loss.

The project by researchers at several universities in the UK aims to help people with hearing loss by filtering out background noise in real-time, even in loud environments.

The technology combines lip-reading technology, artificial intelligence and cloud computing and uses a small camera built into glasses to track the speaker’s lip movements while a smartphone app uses 5G to send both audio and visual data to a cloud server.

AI then isolates the speaker’s voice from surrounding noise and sends the cleaned-up sound back to the listener’s hearing aid or headphones almost instantly.

If two people are talking at once, the AI uses visual cues to extract the voice of the person being looked at.

Researchers hope to have a working version of the glasses by 2026.

Noise samples from a range of sound sources, from washing machines to traffic, have been collected to improve the system’s training.

Project leader Professor Mathini Sellathurai of Heriot-Watt University in the UK said: “We’re not trying to reinvent hearing aids. We’re trying to give them superpowers. You simply point the camera or look at the person you want to hear.”

“Even if two people are talking at once, the AI uses visual cues to extract the voice of the person you’re looking at.”

Some noise-cancelling technologies already exist but struggle with overlapping voices or complex background sounds, something this system aims to overcome.

By shifting the heavy processing work to cloud servers, the researchers can apply” glasses “could help anyone working in noisy places, from oil rigs to hospital wards”.

“There are only a few big companies that make hearing aids and they have limited support in noisy environments,” he said.

“We want to break that barrier and help more people, especially children and older adults, access affordable, AI-driven hearing support.”