Starkey Laboratories, Inc.

Dominic Perz

Tao Zhang

Karrie Recker

Martin McKinney

Eric Durant

Matthew D Kleffner

Dean G Meyer

Ivo Merks

William S Woods

Ivo Leon Diane Marie Merks

In an audio signal, one or more processing circuits recognize spoken content in a user's own speech signal using speech recognition and natural language understanding. The spoken content describes a listening difficulty of the user. The one or more processing circuits generate, based on the spoken content, one or more actions for hearing devices and feedback for the user. The one or more actions attempt to resolve the listening difficulty. Additionally, the one or more processing circuits convert the user feedback to verbal feedback using speech synthesis and transmit the one or more actions and the verbal feedback to the hearing devices via a body-worn device. The hearing devices are configured to perform the one or more actions and play back the verbal feedback to the user.

Interactive system for hearing devices

Disclosed herein, among other things, are methods and apparatus for improved noise reduction for hearing assistance devices. In various embodiments, a hearing assistance device includes a microphone and a processor configured to receive signals from the microphone. The processor is configured to perform noise reduction which adjusts maximum gain reduction as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and which reduces the strength of its maximum gain reduction for intermediate signal-to-noise ratio levels to reduce speech distortion. In various embodiments, the hearing assistance device includes a memory configured to log noise reduction data for user environments. Also provided are methods to further adjust the noise reduction based on the logged information.

Methods and apparatus for improved noise reduction for hearing assistance devices

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Bloomington, MN, United States of America

Dominic Perz