Startup One Llama really wants you to pay attention when you’re walking around town with your headphones on. But, let’s face it, they know you aren’t going to do that so they’ve taken the next best step by developing a mobile app that can listen for audio cues and alert a user to any dangerous or important sounds.
As detailed by MIT Technology Review, One Llama’s new app, called Audio Aware, runs in the background on Android-powered smartphones and will be able to detect sounds that “distracted walkers” might want to be aware of, such as screeching tires, car horns, and sirens. Once detected, the app will automatically interrupt any audio on a user’s device and alert the user by playing back an amplified version of the sound.
But One Llama doesn’t plan to stop there. The same technology that lets the company detect and recognize sounds in the environment, called “artificial ear,” could be put to use in many different applications, such as medical monitoring, sports, and even bird watching.
The Audio Aware app will come pre-programmed to detect a range of sounds, but users will also be able to train it to recognize new sounds, and then share those profiles with other users. There are also practical applications for those with hearing impairments. One Llama co-founder David Tcheng predicts that his company’s technology could help the hard of hearing detect things like doorbells and broken glass in their homes, for example.
The One Llama Audio Aware app is expected to launch in March for Android. It’s unknown at this time if an app for other platforms is in the works, especially considering the API limits of iOS, but the company eventually plans to market the technology to manufacturers producing the next generation of wearable devices.
