On: Eat, Drink and Be Wary: Ex-CIA Officer Reveals How...

[ben_jones]

I'd imagine the priority might be:

1) Microphone all possible tables and have them record/signal when key words are overheard

2) Befriend/seduce/bribe wait staff and train them to roam around in optimal patterns to catch conversation

3) Some kind of subtle hearing amplification/focusing device

4) Record all conversations using a device on your person and process them later

[onion2k → ben_jones]

Record all conversations using a device on your person and process them later

Processing and extracting multiple conversations at different levels from a single audio source automatically would be a great project to attack with some quite simple sound engineering tools and speech recognition ML.

[AstralStorm → onion2k]

Cocktail party problem is actually hard in ML. And that's not even getting into speech recognition on imperfectly segmented speech streams.

Keywords: multiple talker speech segmentation, computational auditory scene analysis CASA