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Launching CPC3

· 3 min read
Jon Barker
Jon Barker
Clarity Team Member
  • 3rd Clarity Prediction Challenge (CPC-3)
  • Launch: March 17th; Submission: July 31st, 2025
  • Workshop: 22nd August 2025, an INTERSPEECH satellite workshop
  • https://claritychallenge.org/

Dear colleague,

It gives us great pleasure to announce the launch of the 3rd Clarity Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge (CPC3).

The Challenge

To improve hearing enhancement technologies, such as hearing aids and hearable devices, we need reliable methods for automatically assessing the speech intelligibility of audio signals.

In recent years, we have organised the CPC1 and CPC2 Challenges to promote the development of such prediction systems. We are now launching the third round of this challenge, building on previous efforts by incorporating a more extensive and diverse set of listener data for training and evaluation.

What will be provided

  • Hearing aid outputs: Audio produced by various simulated hearing aids while processing speech in noisy environments.
  • Clean speech reference signals
  • Listening Test Results: This includes transcripts and intelligibility scores from tests in which hearing-impaired listeners were asked to repeat what they heard.
  • Listener Characteristics: Information regarding the severity of hearing impairment for each listener.
  • Software Tools: Tools include a baseline system based on HASPI scores.

Your system will need to predict intelligibility scores based on the hearing aid outputs. We will explore two types of systems: intrusive metrics, which also use clean speech reference signals, and non-intrusive systems that make predictions based solely on the hearing aid outputs.

There will be cash prizes for the top three systems courtesy of our sponsors, the Hearing Industry Research Consortium (https://hearingirc.com/)

For further details, including how to obtain the data and how to register to enter, please see https://claritychallenge.org/docs/cpc3/cpc3_intro.

The Workshop

The results of the new challenge will be showcased at an ISCA workshop satellite event of Interspeech 2025 in Rotterdam on 22nd August 2025.

For further details, see https://claritychallenge.org/clarity2025-workshop/.

Important Dates

  • 17th March 2025: Launch of challenge, the release of the training data set (i.e. signals and paired intelligibility scores).
  • 24th March 2025: Release of the development data.
  • 14th April 2025: Opening of the development data leaderboard.
  • 1st July 2025: Release of evaluation data.
  • 31st July 2025: Submission deadline. All entrants must have submitted their predictions plus a draft of their technical report.
    • Scores will be returned to entrants within 24 hours of submission.
  • 22nd August 2025: Clarity 2025 workshop, @Interspeech, Rotterdam
  • 22nd September 2025: Deadline for submission of finalised Workshop papers.

For further information

To keep up to date, please join our Clarity Challenge Google group. If you have questions, please contact us directly using the contact details found here.

Organisers

  • Michael A. Akeroyd, University of Nottingham
  • Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
  • Trevor J. Cox, University of Salford
  • John F. Culling, Cardiff University
  • Jennifer Firth, University of Nottingham
  • Simone Graetzer, University of Salford
  • Graham Naylor, University of Nottingham

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK

Supported by RNID (formerly Action on Hearing Loss), Hearing Industry Research Consortium, Amazon TTS Research