Amazon's Next Noise-Canceling Headphones Could Turn Off When Someone Yells Your Name

I’m not sure why these are being touted for safety purposes—last time I checked, bicyclists or cars don’t give you predefined cues before hitting you, nor would you have time to react if they did. These headphones only seem to be of benefit to your significant other or co-worker who wants to get your attention from a distance.

Amazon might be working on the first headphones that can save lives. The company was just awarded a patent on July 19 for a noise-canceling headphone that automatically clicks off when it "hears" certain sound patterns, frequencies and even keywords like a name. The feature would allow the wearer to instantly tune back into his or her surroundings, and hopefully get out of the way of oncoming traffic. A diagram in the patent application filed on July 25, 2014 shows an array of microphones built into the ear pads. I assume those could be used to listen to ambient sounds, similar to the way the Amazon Echo's Alexa is always aware of vocal prompts spoken around her. The description even talks about training the microphones to listen for a two-part audio command like "Hey Justin!"

I can see myself wearing noise cancelling headphones in some confined space situation (inside an airplane cabin, inside a public/mass transit vehicle, something similar) but not out in general public like walking down the street or whatever, there's just too much going on that needs to be paid attention to on various levels. My wife asked me once if I'd rather be deaf or blind and I had to say blind because hearing is a 360 degree sense - you can't see a car coming up from behind or a bear about to attack or some animal about to pounce or, well you get the idea, if it's behind you then your vision proves useless in the detection you but you can damned sure hear it coming or you should be able to. That puts hearing in my book as a more valuable sense overall - I'm not saying I do actually want to be blind, of course not, but if I ranked the senses for pure survival potential I'd have to rate hearing as the most valuable followed by sight but that's just me.

If they can make headphones of any kind that do active monitoring for specific things like sirens, high pitched screeches (aka that car rushing towards you even as the driver is hitting the brakes as hard as possible, and so on), things of that nature and disables the audio so you can actually hear what the hell is going on around you I suppose that's a good thing as long as it can be a) disabled entirely if so desired and b) adjusted for sensitivity because not all situations will be the same.

It's not a bad thing, I'd say, and definitely something to consider worthy of some research funding.

If it's like online gaming, they'll yell look out after their tire is parked on your chest. At least you'll be able to hear the paramedics when they yell to you.

yeah - every kid in my house would have any earbuds/phones they have taken away and replaced w/ these.

I'd rather have noise-cancelling headphones that turned on when my wife yelled my name.

If you walk into traffic with 'noise cancelling' headphones on you deserve to get your life cancelled by a bus.