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by nyanpasu64 1356 days ago
https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/ says:

> So what should you listen for anyway? As strange as it may sound, you should not be expecting an increase in intelligibility. Humans are so good at understanding speech in noise that an enhancement algorithm — especially one that isn't allowed to look ahead of the speech it's denoising — can only destroy information. So why are we doing this in the first place? For quality. The enhanced speech is much less annoying to listen to and likely causes less listener fatigue.

> Actually, there are still a few cases where it can actually help intelligibility. The first is videoconferencing, when multiple speakers are being mixed together. For that application, noise suppression prevents the noise from all the inactive speakers from being mixed in with the active speaker, improving both quality and intelligibility. A second case is when the speech goes through a low bitrate codec. Those tend to degrade noisy speech more than clean speech, so removing the noise allows the codec to do a better job.

I do think that for direct listening, the jitsi.org speech samples would be slightly more intelligible if the noise removal was tuned to pass through frequencies with mixed noise and signal. I don't know if that would be worse in a video conference. Does the speaker or listener get to choose between conservative and aggressive noise removal?