Puheenkäsittelijä

Puheenkäsittelijä, often translated as speech processor or speech synthesizer, refers to a device or software component that processes and generates human speech. In its most common modern application, it is a crucial part of cochlear implants. For individuals with severe to profound hearing loss who cannot benefit from conventional hearing aids, a cochlear implant bypasses the damaged parts of the ear and directly stimulates the auditory nerve. The external part of the cochlear implant includes a microphone, a speech processor, and a transmitter.

The microphone picks up sound from the environment. This sound is then sent to the speech processor. The speech processor is the "brain" of the external device. It analyzes the incoming sound, filters out irrelevant noise, and converts the speech signal into a digital code. This digital code represents the essential acoustic features of the speech, such as frequency and intensity. This processed information is then transmitted through the skin to the internal implant, which sends electrical impulses to the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve carries these signals to the brain, where they are interpreted as sound. The effectiveness of a cochlear implant relies heavily on the sophisticated algorithms and processing capabilities of the speech processor to extract meaningful speech information from complex acoustic environments. Different speech processing strategies are employed by manufacturers to optimize speech understanding for individual users.