There are a growing number of companies working on technologies that strive to make a person’s voice more intelligible to the listener over speakers, headphones, hearing aids and other consumer audio devices. Augmented Hearing, a Danish startup launched two years ago, is one of the more interesting companies at CES 2023 focusing on this space. The firm’s software-based solution runs on iOS, Windows and other CE operating systems. Their solution could mitigate the current trend of people across all age groups turning on closed captioning because they often find video dialogue difficult to understand.

Augmented Hearing, which develops extended earbuds with AI to enhance speech in challenging acoustics, designed its product for first responders and other critical communication situations where loud background noise would be expected and could make critical spoken information difficult to hear.

The company cites public safety, aviation and call centers as just some of the sectors that would benefit from its products.

There are multiple ‘before and after’ demos of the tech at work on the company’s website. They currently achieve 20ms latency on real-time processing, and they expect to achieve 6-8ms latency in the near future for the hearing aid market. That means that the enhancement doesn’t interfere with the natural flow of conversation.

The software was trained primarily on the voices of English speakers, but the solution is language-agnostic and will improve for all languages with more diverse training.