Machine learning improves human speech recognition

Hearing loss is a rapidly growing area of scientific research as the number of baby boomers dealing with hearing loss continues to increase as they age. To understand how hearing loss impacts people, researchers study people's ability to recognize speech. It is more difficult for people to recognize human speech if there is reverberation, some hearing impairment, or significant background noise, such as traffic noise or multiple speakers. As a result, hearing aid algorithms are often used to improve human speech recognition. To evaluate such algorithms, researchers perform experiments that aim to determine the signal-to-noise ratio at which a specific number of words (commonly 50%) are recognized.