(Credit: Eric Zeman)
LAHAINA, Hawaii—AI is everywhere at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, including the actual air! Sort of. The company had a number of AI technology demos on hand, and the one that caught my ear involved silence.
We're all familiar with how noise-cancelling headphones work. They use embedded mics to capture ambient sound, then process it with algorithms to generate an inverse sound wave that cancels it out. They function the same way whether you're listening to music or making phone calls. In the latter case, the headphones use the inverse wave to cancel out the surrounding din so you and your caller don't hear it. The result depends somewhat on the strength of the manufacturer's algorithms; some are better at it than others.
But what if you didn't need noise-cancelling earphones for crystal-clear calls at all? Phones already use the onboard mics to process and lower background noise; they've done so for many years. What I saw takes things to a whole new level.
Qualcomm had a test device on-site with its new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 processor. As described to me, the phone could triangulate its mics to create an algorithmically defined sound bubble around it, silencing everything outside it.
The invisible bubble had a radius of about 5 feet for the purposes of the demonstration, but it can be made any size you want or need. A Qualcomm staffer made a call with the device and played sound from a nearby Bluetooth speaker, about 10 feet away. Despite the noise, his phone captured and transmitted only his voice; it completely stripped the Bluetooth speaker's sound from his call, making it inaudible on the other end of the line. The algorithms were also trained to silence extraneous noise from inside the bubble. The staffer started clapping right next to the phone while he was speaking, and still, the only sound that came through the other phone was his voice.
This could be a great tool not just for call quality, but for privacy. Consider how many times you've had to take a call in a space where it wasn't appropriate for your caller to hear the background noise, such as certain work environments. Or times when you didn't have a pair of headphones handy. There's definite potential here.
Qualcomm didn't say if or when this type of technology would reach actual shipping devices, but it's a neat use of AI to accomplish something helpful for a basic activity like making phone calls.
To think about it in a much cooler way: Qualcomm used AI to create a force field that blocks sound. How rad is that?
About Our Expert
I’m PCMag’s Managing Editor for Consumer Electronics content, overseeing an experienced team of reviewers and product testers. I’ve been covering technology for more than 25 years. Prior to PCMag, I worked at outlets such as Android Authority, Fortune, InformationWeek, and Phonescoop.Â
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