The cocktail party problem refers to the challenge of following a single person’s speech in a room full of surrounding chatter and noise. With a little concentration, humans can focus in on what a particular person is saying. But when we want technology to separate the speech of a targeted person from the simultaneous conversations of others—as we do with hands-free telephony when a caller is in a car with kids in the back seat—the results leave much to be desired. Until now, that is, says Mitsubishi Electric. The company demonstrated its speech separation technology at its annual R&D Open House in Tokyo on 24 May. In one type of demonstration, two people spoke a sentence in different languages simultaneously into a single microphone.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/mitsubishi-electrics-ai-can-follow-and-separate-simultaneous-speech