Even moderate volume settings led to blunt, distorted, and often painful amplification. App is clunky at best. "Delight" is a bold choice of name for any type of tech product, but it's especially ambitious in the world of hearing aids, where "begrudgingly tolerate" is the highest praise typically offered. Undaunted, Elehear's latest over-the-counter release aims to raise the bar on user satisfaction, featuring a major design change and leveraging a new AI algorithm (naturally) to improve noise reduction and reduce feedback. Designed as in-the-ear devices with discretion in mind, the Delight cuts a much different profile than the more traditional, behind-the-ear Beyond Pro and Beyond hearing aids. The big question: Can they perform as well as BTE offerings?

This work investigates the integration of generative visual aids in human-robot task communication. We developed GenComUI, a system powered by large language models that dynamically generates contextual visual aids (such as map annotations, path indicators, and animations) to support verbal task communication and facilitate the generation of customized task programs for the robot. This system was informed by a formative study that examined how humans use external visual tools to assist verbal communication in spatial tasks. To evaluate its effectiveness, we conducted a user experiment (n = 20) comparing GenComUI with a voice-only baseline. The results demonstrate that generative visual aids, through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, enhance verbal task communication by providing continuous visual feedback, thus promoting natural and effective human-robot communication. Additionally, the study offers a set of design implications, emphasizing how dynamically generated visual aids can serve as an effective communication medium in human-robot interaction. These findings underscore the potential of generative visual aids to inform the design of more intuitive and effective human-robot communication, particularly for complex communication scenarios in human-robot interaction and LLM-based end-user development.

The prevalence of hearing aids is increasing. However, optimizing the amplification processes of hearing aids remains challenging due to the complexity of integrating multiple modular components in traditional methods. To address this challenge, we present NeuroAMP, a novel deep neural network designed for end-to-end, personalized amplification in hearing aids. NeuroAMP leverages both spectral features and the listener's audiogram as inputs, and we investigate four architectures: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), and Transformer. We also introduce Denoising NeuroAMP, an extension that integrates noise reduction along with amplification capabilities for improved performance in real-world scenarios. To enhance generalization, a comprehensive data augmentation strategy was employed during training on diverse speech (TIMIT and TMHINT) and music (Cadenza Challenge MUSIC) datasets. Evaluation using the Hearing Aid Speech Perception Index (HASPI), Hearing Aid Speech Quality Index (HASQI), and Hearing Aid Audio Quality Index (HAAQI) demonstrates that the Transformer architecture within NeuroAMP achieves the best performance, with SRCC scores of 0.9927 (HASQI) and 0.9905 (HASPI) on TIMIT, and 0.9738 (HAAQI) on the Cadenza Challenge MUSIC dataset. Notably, our data augmentation strategy maintains high performance on unseen datasets (e.g., VCTK, MUSDB18-HQ). Furthermore, Denoising NeuroAMP outperforms both the conventional NAL-R+WDRC approach and a two-stage baseline on the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset, achieving a 10% improvement in both HASPI (0.90) and HASQI (0.59) scores. These results highlight the potential of NeuroAMP and Denoising NeuroAMP to deliver notable improvements in personalized hearing aid amplification.

The DeepFilterNet (DFN) architecture was recently proposed as a deep learning model suited for hearing aid devices. Despite its competitive performance on numerous benchmarks, it still follows a `one-size-fits-all' approach, which aims to train a single, monolithic architecture that generalises across different noises and environments. However, its limited size and computation budget can hamper its generalisability. Recent work has shown that in-context adaptation can improve performance by conditioning the denoising process on additional information extracted from background recordings to mitigate this. These recordings can be offloaded outside the hearing aid, thus improving performance while adding minimal computational overhead. We introduce these principles to the DFN model, thus proposing the DFingerNet (DFiN) model, which shows superior performance on various benchmarks inspired by the DNS Challenge.

Modern commercial games are designed for mass appeal, not for individual players, but there is a unique opportunity in video games to better fit the individual through adapting game elements. In this paper, we focus on AI Directors, systems which can dynamically modify a game, that personalize the player experience to match the player's preference. In the past, some AI Director studies have provided inconclusive results, so their effect on player experience is not clear. We take three AI Directors and directly compare them in a human subject study to test their effectiveness on quest selection. Our results show that a non-random AI Director provides a better player experience than a random AI Director.

Signia was an early mover in the in-ear hearing aid world when it released its Active Pro line two years ago, and the industry has continued to evolve dramatically since. While there are plenty more in-ear aids on the market today, Signia's bread and butter is found in the more traditional side of the hearing aid world, with new behind-the-ear models launching regularly. The latest of these is the Pure Charge&Go IX. The IX in the name isn't a Roman number nine but rather shorthand for Integrated Xperience, which Signia claims is "the world's first hearing tech platform capable of pinpointing multiple conversation partners in real time, providing unprecedented sound clarity and definition for wearers in multi-speaker scenarios." The company says the IX is built around a wholly new platform focused on optimizing multiparty conversations in noisy environments.

This paper introduces our system submission for the Cadenza ICASSP 2024 Grand Challenge, which presents the problem of remixing and enhancing music for hearing aid users. Our system placed first in the challenge, achieving the best average Hearing-Aid Audio Quality Index (HAAQI) score on the evaluation data set. We describe the system, which uses an ensemble of deep learning music source separators that are fine tuned on the challenge data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through the challenge results and analyze the importance of different system aspects through ablation studies.

This paper reports on the design and results of the 2024 ICASSP SP Cadenza Challenge: Music Demixing/Remixing for Hearing Aids. The Cadenza project is working to enhance the audio quality of music for those with a hearing loss. The scenario for the challenge was listening to stereo reproduction over loudspeakers via hearing aids. The task was to: decompose pop/rock music into vocal, drums, bass and other (VDBO); rebalance the different tracks with specified gains and then remixing back to stereo. End-to-end approaches were also accepted. 17 systems were submitted by 11 teams. Causal systems performed poorer than non-causal approaches. 9 systems beat the baseline. A common approach was to fine-tuning pretrained demixing models. The best approach used an ensemble of models.

Automated assessment of speech intelligibility in hearing aid (HA) devices is of great importance. Our previous work introduced a non-intrusive multi-branched speech intelligibility prediction model called MBI-Net, which achieved top performance in the Clarity Prediction Challenge 2022. Based on the promising results of the MBI-Net model, we aim to further enhance its performance by leveraging Whisper embeddings to enrich acoustic features. In this study, we propose two improved models, namely MBI-Net+ and MBI-Net++. MBI-Net+ maintains the same model architecture as MBI-Net, but replaces self-supervised learning (SSL) speech embeddings with Whisper embeddings to deploy cross-domain features. On the other hand, MBI-Net++ further employs a more elaborate design, incorporating an auxiliary task to predict frame-level and utterance-level scores of the objective speech intelligibility metric HASPI (Hearing Aid Speech Perception Index) and multi-task learning. Experimental results confirm that both MBI-Net++ and MBI-Net+ achieve better prediction performance than MBI-Net in terms of multiple metrics, and MBI-Net++ is better than MBI-Net+.

Among various distance functions for graphs, graph and subgraph edit distances (GED and SED respectively) are two of the most popular and expressive measures. Unfortunately, exact computations for both are NP-hard. To overcome this computational bottleneck, neural approaches to learn and predict edit distance in polynomial time have received much interest. While considerable progress has been made, there exist limitations that need to be addressed. First, the efficacy of an approximate distance function lies not only in its approximation accuracy, but also in the preservation of its properties. To elaborate, although GED is a metric, its neural approximations do not provide such a guarantee. This prohibits their usage in higher order tasks that rely on metric distance functions, such as clustering or indexing. Second, several existing frameworks for GED do not extend to SED due to SED being asymmetric. In this work, we design a novel siamese graph neural network called GREED, which through a carefully crafted inductive bias, learns GED and SED in a property-preserving manner. Through extensive experiments across 10 real graph datasets containing up to 7 million edges, we establish that GREED is not only more accurate than the state of the art, but also up to 3 orders of magnitude faster. Even more significantly, due to preserving the triangle inequality, the generated embeddings are indexable and consequently, even in a CPU-only environment, GREED is up to 50 times faster than GPU-powered baselines for graph / subgraph retrieval.