Slow Down Speech in Real Time with EasyListen™
Increase Your Hearing Comprehension
- Do you ever have conversations with “fast talkers” — people who speak so fast you can’t catch every word?
- When listening to a foreign language, would you like more time to process the meaning?
- Would it be helpful to have extra time to write down information from recorded messages, such as names, phone numbers or dates?
We have a technology that can help. It’s called EasyListen™, and is included in every Wear & Hear product, such as BeHear personalizable Bluetooth headsets.
How Does EasyListen Assistive Listening Technology Work?
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EasyListen is a real-time technology that dynamically slows down incoming speech, making it more natural and understandable. While “time stretching” technologies for speech modification have been around for a long time, EasyListen is more complex and intelligent than the classical approaches. The key is the word “dynamically” and following are the main differences:
- Inevitably, slowing down an audio signal in real time means a delay is accumulating rapidly. This accumulated delay must be addressed eventually — without interfering with the important parts of speech that follow. Natural pauses occur in each typical conversation and shortening such pauses is used to reduce the delay. However, if the speaker talks fast continuously, with no pauses, EasyListen will gradually stop slowing down his/her monologue when the maximal allowed delay is exceeded.
- Tones, noises and other irrelevant sounds are not stretched.
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- Not all parts of the speech are slowed down equally. Sophisticated speech analysis is performed, and only those parts that are important for understanding, but just too fast, are slowed down to the extent that is necessary. Consequently, different vowels, plosives and fricatives are not stretched in an equal manner. And some sounds that that do not require stretching are not processed at all. For example such continuous sounds as “aaaa”, “yee”, “mmm”, etc., are not stretched.
EasyListen technology is language-independent and works equally well with Western and Eastern tonal languages.
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