Ever feel like manually pressing the buttons on that remote control is too much work?

Me too.

Well, fear not, Gentle Reader: Things are about to get a whole lot easier.

Oki Japan and a team from Waseda University are working on a speech recognition powered remote control that pulls a single target voice from background noise and the voices of other speakers.

Apparently, the new remote relies on four embedded microphones and “a proprietary algorithm for voice frequency analysis [that] detects talking that originates from directly in front of the device and automatically separates this out from other sounds being picked up by the microphones.”

Here are some links that are sadly not speech enabled and will have to be clicked:

Link 1

Link 2