Why an AI firm is busy smashing thousands of windows

In a sound-proofed hangar on an RAF airbase just north of Cambridge, UK, Chris Mitchell and his colleagues are busy using sledgehammers to teach their computers a lesson.
The team has gathered thousands of window panes and doors, all of different shapes and sizes, which they then smash, one by one, recording the distinctive shattering sound of each type of glass. Sometimes they swing sledgehammers or garden spades, sometimes they throw bricks. “We completely underestimated the mess it would make,” says Mitchell. “And how tiring it would be.”
Welcome to the latest frontier of artificial intelligence. Mitchell is CEO and founder of Audio Analytic, a Cambridge-based start-up that is training a machine learning system to recognise the sound of breaking glass.
And it’s not just glass: the company is also teaching computers to pick out other sounds that are important to humans, like smoke alarms, bawling babies and barking dogs. The idea is to build this ability to recognise sounds – without confusing a dropped glass with a smashed window, say – into smart-home systems that will alert you when an intruder breaks in or your child starts to cry.
In the last few years, computers have become very good at understanding the world by sight. AIs are now better than humans at recognising certain objects, especially faces. But apart from speech recognition – which is at the heart of services like Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa – highly accurate sound recognition has been given little attention. Everyday noises are just background din to most machines.
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