Dipl.-Ing. Sebastian Best, Erlangen
Video 12 2017
“Own-voice perception: Naturalness achieved by a newly developed analysing method”
Conventional hearing aids have been optimised to make speech comprehensible in various situations. Now the next step in development has been taken: hearing aids can actively contribute to improve perception of one‘s own voice, thus reducing the threshold to participate in
social activities.
Everybody knows what it is like to hear one‘s your own voice on a recording for the first time: one is startled – “is this really me?” During first fit, hearing aid users are faced with a similar situation. However, the stakes are higher – they use their own voice as a reference to assess if the hearing aids sound natural or not.
Modern hearing systems analyse many acoustic characteristics in the listening environment. While previous systems recognised speech in general, it is now possible for users to identify their voice based on typical characteristics, and to adjust the processing accordingly. This opens up extensive new possibilities for fitting.
The talk will give an overview of why the user‘s own voice sounds so strange, and how this new technology helps to increase the sense of naturalness for the user. Studies will be presented that investigate the influence of the new algorithms on sound quality, speech intelligibility, and acceptance of hearing aids.