Teleface-the use of a synthetic face for the hard of hearing

In the Teleface project the possibilities for a visual telephone communication aid for hearing impaired persons are being evaluated. Multimodal speech intelligibility experiments showed a marked intelligibility advantage for the addition of the face information, both for natural and synthetic faces. This is valid for hearing impaired persons as well as for normal-hearing persons in a noisy environment. We present results from two series of tests with hearing impaired subjects.