William Gallagher, AppleInsider:

Picture the scene. You’re sitting on a park bench, listening to Francisca Valenzuela Essentials on Apple Music over your AirPods Pro, when a man in a dark overcoat sits next to you. He says quietly, “the weather is very cold in Leningrad,” — but you don’t hear him because you’ve got noise cancelling on.

Or you’re at home, it’s your partner’s turn to cook and he or she has been yelling “dinner’s ready” for ten minutes, but you don’t hear that either. You only hear the music in your AirPods.

And:

“Interrupt for noise-cancelling audio devices,” is a newly revealed Apple patent application that aims to work around this.

And:

Apple proposes that when it’s the iPhone that is producing the music that an AirPods user is listening to, that iPhone listens out for external noise. “[It performs] at least a first level of identification (e.g., of a spoken name of the user, or of the contact as one of several interrupt-authorized contacts) of the voice at the audio device,” says Apple.

This is a patent. Not a product. But still, I do love the concept. Key is to be able to limit who can turn off your noise cancelation, if you want to limit that.