Conversational AI

Five-year Clarity Challenge to help improve hearing aids

Participating teams reported their progress at a workshop earlier this month.

By Daniel Korzekwa

September 30, 2021

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The Clarity Challenge is a five-year project with the goal of finding new ways to process sound inside hearing aids. Each year, scientists from around the world will participate in machine learning competitions to make speech more intelligible for people with hearing impairments.

The project is run by four universities in the UK: the University of Nottingham, the University of Sheffield, the University of Salford, and the University of Cardiff. The project is supported by the Hearing Industry Research Consortium and the Alexa Speech Research team. One of the project’s key aims is to bring together existing hearing-aid research and new machine learning techniques.

The Alexa Speech Research team is participating in project planning and serving on the project’s steering and scientific committees. Scientists from the Alexa team share technical expertise in speech processing, review scientific reports, and advise on the future directions of the project.

The Clarity Challenge held a satellite workshop on September 16 and 17 in which participants presented their work from the first round of the competition. The planning team that includes the Alexa Speech organization has published a research paper that contains more details.

At Amazon, our focus is always on what we can do to help make our customers’ lives better. The Clarity Challenge is a great way to do that and consequently has our strong support.

About the Author

Daniel Korzekwa

Daniel Korzekwa is an applied-science manager with the Amazon Text-to-Speech organization.

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