What´s that you say? [comms speech]

Research by the Centre for Law Enforcement Audio Research (CLEAR) has shown that most speech enhancement techniques improve sound quality at the expense of intelligibility, particularly when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is very low. Closely related as they are, speech quality and intelligibility are not identical. By pooling their understandings of both human perception and signal processing, the team hopes to pin down the factors that affect intelligibility and then to develop speech enhancement algorithms designed to suit the human auditory system.