Proactive Hearing Assistants that Isolate Egocentric Conversations

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time, on-device proactive hearing assistant that isolates conversation partners using egocentric binaural audio and self-speech cues, improving multi-party conversation understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-model architecture for real-time partner identification and isolation in egocentric audio, advancing proactive hearing assistance technology.

Findings

Effective partner identification in multi-party conversations

Generalizes well across different speakers and settings

Operates with low latency on-device

Abstract

We introduce proactive hearing assistants that automatically identify and separate the wearer's conversation partners, without requiring explicit prompts. Our system operates on egocentric binaural audio and uses the wearer's self-speech as an anchor, leveraging turn-taking behavior and dialogue dynamics to infer conversational partners and suppress others. To enable real-time, on-device operation, we propose a dual-model architecture: a lightweight streaming model runs every 12.5 ms for low-latency extraction of the conversation partners, while a slower model runs less frequently to capture longer-range conversational dynamics. Results on real-world 2- and 3-speaker conversation test sets, collected with binaural egocentric hardware from 11 participants totaling 6.8 hours, show generalization in identifying and isolating conversational partners in multi-conversation settings. Our work marks a step toward hearing assistants that adapt proactively to conversational dynamics and engagement. More information can be found on our website: https://proactivehearing.cs.washington.edu/