Deep Learning enables hearing aid wearers to pick out a voice in a crowded room
&gt; The greatest frustration among potential users is that a hearing aid cannot distinguish between, for example, a voice and the sound of a passing car if those sounds occur at the same time. The device cranks up the volume on both, creating an incoherent din.<p>It may be a simplification of the article that I&#x27;m misinterpreting, but as someone who got a hearing aid in early 2016, that&#x27;s not how (modern) hearing aids work.<p>I got my hearing tested which enabled a frequency response of my hearing loss to be plotted (my hearing at low frequencies is fine, at higher freq I have moderate loss). My hearing aid is then tuned to match the inverse of that freq plot (ie boost volume of high frequencies, leave low freq alone).<p>You don&#x27;t actually want a HA that arbitrarily boosts &#x27;speech&#x27; since that won&#x27;t be matched to your needs and has unintended side effects (like music can sound overly harsh&#x2F;bright) because un-needed frequencies are being boosted or supressed).<p>--
On a tangent, after I got my new HAs, I complained to the audiologist that they didn&#x27;t sound very good. Everything sounded far too crisp. She pointed out that having lived with hearing loss for 5-6 years, I actually had almost no idea what something should sound like since my brain had got used to a world with muted high frequency sounds.<p>That blows my mind ... a bit like how do you know the color green is green. Maybe it&#x27;s purple, but you have been told by someone else that it&#x27;s green.<p>After a few weeks, my brain re-learnt what sound should sound like and now it sounds &#x27;normal&#x27; with HA in. Without HA, everything is a little more muffled (as you would expect) and I really notice how much I used to struggle understanding people (I believe my untreated hearing loss contributed to me losing my job a couple of years ago).<p>Hearing aids have changed my quality of life (at age 40).