Artificial intelligence for speech enhancement

We make a smartphone app called HeardThat which uses AI to enhance speech so that the app user can hear more easily in noisy areas. Understanding speech in noise is the most common complaint of adults with hearing loss, even if it is mild loss, and whether or not they have hearing aids. Hearing loss affects about 20% of the world's population.Our HeardThat product has been used over a million times. It uses the microphones in a person's smartphone to gather environmental sound and then uses AI running on the phone to remove the noise.To increase the number of use cases where our technology can be used, we have recently introduced the HeardThat Remote Mic Kit (RMK). It consists of two wireless clip-on microphones and a receiver that plugs into the phone.The AI algorithms that HeardThat uses have been optimized for audio coming from a phone’s built-in mics. The mics in the RMK have somewhat different characteristics. The goal of this project is to gather data from RMK mics and use it to fine tune the existing AI models.A stretch goal is to investigate synthesizing data for training the models. Such data needs to be as realistic as possible to match the characteristics of the mics and room effects (such as reverb). The goal is to recommend the best approaches.