Augmented Intelligibility in Simultaneous Multi-talker Environments

Speech intelligibility can be severely compromised in environments where there are several competing speakers. It may be possible, however, to improve speech intelligibility in such environments by manipulating certain acoustic parameters known to facilitate the segregation of competing signals. The first step in designing such a feature-rich audio display is to understand the significant elements of human auditory perception that affect information transmission capacity. We review a series of experiments to examine the impact of different audio-display design parameters on overall intelligibility of simultaneous speech messages and show how using these features may improve intelligibility.