3-D-Printed Device Helps Computers Solve Cocktail-Party Problem Artificial-intelligence researchers have long struggled to make computers perform a task that is simple for humans: picking out one person speech when multiple people nearby are talking simultaneously.

It is called the ˜cocktail-party problem™. Typical approaches to solving it have either involved systems with multiple microphones, which distinguish speakers based on their position in a room, or complex artificial-intelligence algorithms that try to separate different voices on a recording.

But the latest invention, described in this week Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a simple 3D-printed device that can pinpoint the origin of a sound without the need for any sophisticated electronics.

The device is a thick plastic disk, about as wide as a pizza. Openings around the edge channel sound through 36 passages towards a microphone in the middle. Each passage modifies the sound in a subtly different way as it travels towards the centre”roughly as if an equalizer with different settings were affecting the sound in each slice, explains senior author Steven Cummer, an electrical engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.