Google has developed an AI that can pick out someone’s voice in a noisy room.
By looking at people’s faces when they’re speaking, the firm has trained a machine to spot individual people as they talk and isolate their voice against background noise.
Technology such as this could easily be used to spy on secret conversations.
However, Google claims its applications are likely to be in clearing up speech in video calls and boosting the power of hearing aids.
To learn how to isolate a voice, the AI was taught to recognise the speech of individuals in a quiet environment.
It did this by analysing how their faces changed as they spoke different words at different frequencies.
Google then created virtual ‘cocktail parties’ that included significant background noise and several people speaking at one.