From Selective Listening to Brain-Controlled Hearing: A Perspective on the Future of Auditory Technology.

Understanding speech in noisy environments is a major challenge for millions, a problem that conventional hearing aids often exacerbate by amplifying all sounds indiscriminately. Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD) offers a revolutionary alternative: a brain-computer interface that decodes a listener's attentional focus from their neural signals to selectively enhance the desired sound source. For over a decade, research has demonstrated the scientific feasibility of attention decoding, yet the field has faced a critical barrier in translating this promise into a real-time system that provides a demonstrable perceptual benefit in real-world listening conditions. This perspective charts the journey of AAD, from its foundational neuroscientific discoveries to the current engineering hurdles that must be overcome for real-world deployment. We outline the key remaining challenges, including the need to define user-centric metrics for success, develop practical and power-efficient wearable sensors, design low-latency and computationally efficient decoding algorithms, and ensure robust performance in complex, naturalistic scenes. By addressing these questions, the field can move beyond passive amplification and create the next generation of assistive technology: one that listens with the brain to restore or augment the hearing experience, making it fully aligned with the user's intent.