ENRICH — Enriched communication across the lifespan

Results in brief

Enriched communication across the lifespan

Communication using speech is natural, ubiquitous, and efficient, so a reduced capacity in speaking or hearing creates huge barriers to social inclusion. Trends in health, technology and social mobility create challenges for listeners. Age-related hearing loss affects half of all Europeans by the age of 80. Listeners are faced with artificial speech from voice assistants in the home, at work, and while travelling, often in noisy environments. We are exposed to speech spoken non-natively, or spoken in a first language other than our own. These factors reduce intelligibility or make speech more demanding to process. Technological solutions such as hearing aids and speech synthesis can help, yet their use often imposes even greater effort for listeners. ENRICH (Enriched Communication across the Lifespan) is a EU-funded Marie Sklodowska Curie European Training Network made up of universities, research institutes, clinics and technology companies whose objectives are to better understand how listeners process different styles of speech, to determine what aspects of speech make one form more intelligible or easy to process than another, to characterise how different types of listener are affected by distinct speech styles and to design effective algorithms that are capable of enriching speech, making it easier to understand and less demanding to process. ENRICH has trained 14 early-stage researchers with backgrounds in psychology, linguistics, engineering and computer science, acquiring skills in disciplines required to make novel contributions in speech communication, as well as training in complementary areas including entrepreneurship, technical writing, scientific conduct and public dissemination. ENRICH has led to new insights into how listeners respond to different forms of speech and has built on these findings, and from observations of talkers, to generate new algorithms that have improved upon the state of the art in near-end listening enhancement. Findings have been published in journals and international conferences, disseminated to scientific peers and industry groups across Europe and beyond, and communicated to interested citizens online and at public events.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Speech is a hugely efficient means of communication: a reduced capacity in listening or speaking creates a significant barrier to social inclusion at all points through the lifespan, in education, work and at home. Hearing aids and speech synthesis can help address this reduced capacity but their use imposes greater listener effort. The fundamental objective of the ETN ""Enriched communication across the lifespan"" (ENRICH) is to modify or augment speech with additional information to make it easier to process. Enrichment aims to reduce the listening burden by minimising cognitive load, while maintaining or improving intelligibility. ENRICH will investigate the relationship between cognitive effort and different forms of natural and synthetic speech. Non-intrusive metrics for listening effort will be developed and used to design modification techniques which result in low-burden speech. The value of various enrichment approaches will be evaluated with individuals and cohorts with typically sub-optimal communication ability, e.g., children, hearing-impaired adults, non-native listeners and individuals engaged in simultaneous tasks. The ENRICH consortium consists of 8 beneficiaries and 7 partners from academia, industry and clinical practice in 9 countries, who collectively provide diverse infrastructure for investigating spoken communication and for applying innovations to end-user populations. ENRICH will address the unmet need for multi-skilled practitioners and engineers in this rapidly growing sector currently facing a serious workforce shortage. Through a comprehensive training programme driven by the needs of industry and clinical practice, it will equip fellows with not just the necessary cross-disciplinary knowledge and research techniques, but also with experience of entrepreneurship and technology transfer so they can translate research findings into meaningful products and services that will facilitate spoken language communication in the coming decades.""

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAIS VASCO/ EUSKAL HERRIKO UNIBERTSITATEA · LeioaCoordinatorSpain
ACADEMISCH ZIEKENHUIS GRONINGEN · GroningenNetherlands
FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV · MunchenGermany
HORZENTRUM OLDENBURG GGMBH · OLDENBURGGermany
PANEPISTIMIO KRITIS · RETHIMNOGreece
STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT · NijmegenNetherlands
THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH · EdinburghUnited Kingdom
TOBII AB · DanderydSweden
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON · LondonUnited Kingdom

ENRICH · Enriched communication across the lifespan

Results in brief

Enriched communication across the lifespan

Project objective

Participants

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