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Preannoucing CPC3

· 3 min read
Jon Barker
Jon Barker
Clarity Team Member

It gives us great pleasure to pre-announce the 3rd Clarity Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge (CPC-3) that will launch in March 2025.

The Challenge

To develop better hearing enhancement technologies, including hearing aids and hearable devices, we need reliable methods to automatically evaluate the speech intelligibility of audio signals. This requires a predictive model that takes as input both the audio produced by a hearing aid and listener characteristics (e.g., their audiogram) and estimates the speech intelligibility score that the listener would achieve in a listening test.

In recent years, we have run the CPC1 Challenge and CPC2 Challenge to advance such models. We are now launching the third round of this challenge, which builds on previous efforts by incorporating a larger and more diverse set of listener data for training and evaluation.

What will be provided

  • Audio produced by a variety of (simulated) hearing aids for speech-in-noise;
  • The corresponding clean reference signals (the original speech);
  • Characteristics of the listeners (pure tone audiograms, etc);
  • The measured speech intelligibility scores from listening tests, where hearing-impaired listeners were asked to say what they heard after listening to the hearing aid processed signals.
  • Software tools including a baseline system based on HASPI scores.

For further details see https://claritychallenge.org/docs/cpc3/cpc3_intro

The Workshop

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

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

Registering and submitting​

Following the launch on March 17th, we will open registration for prospective entrants. Participants will have until 31st July to submit their entries, which will be evaluated remotely by the organizers. Full submission instructions will be provided at launch.

Important Dates

All dates are to be intended anywhere on earth time (AoE).

  • 17th March 2025: Launch of challenge, release of data.
  • 1st July 2025: Release of evaluation data and opening of submission window.
  • 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 (TBC)
  • 22nd September 2025: Deadline for submission of finalised Workshop papers

Stay informed​

To stay informed please sign up to the Clarity Challenge Google group

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