Hearing Aid Speech Consistency Engine
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Modern hearing aids do not effectively account for varying speech artifacts and idiosyncratic speech patterns, making it difficult for users to understand speech in environments with concurrent visual input, such as classrooms or lectures, as they often require focus on the auditory presentation at the expense of visual information.
Innovation Solution
A hearing assistance system that includes a portable computing device with an audio processing component and speech consistency engine, which receives human speech, converts it to text, and then to consistent speech using a text-to-speech protocol, allowing users to specify preferences for speech characteristics like pausing and intonation, ensuring consistent speech presentation regardless of the speaker's style.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If hearing aids amplify ambient sound to compensate for hearing loss, then hearing ability is improved, but speech consistency and understanding in complex environments deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary processing system that converts variable human speech into consistent speech through text-to-speech synthesis. This intermediary process acts as a mediator between the original speech signal and the user's perception, standardizing speech characteristics while preserving content information.
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes speech parameters by converting variable speech into consistent speech with standardized characteristics. This involves transforming the acoustic parameters of speech to achieve consistency in delivery while maintaining the informational content.
2Reliability
If hearing aids provide amplified speech output, then auditory input is improved, but user concentration on visual information deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
By introducing consistent speech as an intermediary representation, the system reduces the cognitive load required to process variable speech patterns. This allows users to process auditory information more efficiently without sacrificing attention to visual materials.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies speech consistency processing selectively to enhance understanding without over-processing all audio signals. This partial application of the consistency transformation focuses computational resources on improving speech comprehension while maintaining natural audio characteristics for non-speech sounds.
3Speed
If hearing aids process speech in real-time, then responsiveness is improved, but processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the speech processing task into distinct stages: capturing variable speech, converting to text, synthesizing consistent speech, and outputting the result. This segmentation allows each processing stage to be optimized independently and facilitates real-time operation through modular computation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system replaces complex acoustic signal processing with text-based intermediate representation and text-to-speech synthesis. This substitution simplifies the processing architecture by working with discrete text units rather than continuous acoustic signals, reducing computational complexity while maintaining real-time responsiveness.
Data Source
AI summary
Broadly speaking, the embodiments disclosed herein describe an apparatus, system, and method that allows a user of a hearing assistance system to perceive consistent human speech. The consistent human speech can be based upon user specific preferences.