Speech Intelligibility

A measure of how well speech can be understood by a listener, typically expressed as the percentage of words or sentences correctly identified under specific listening conditions. Speech intelligibility is affected by factors including audio bandwidth, background noise, signal processing, and the listener’s hearing ability. In accessibility contexts, speech intelligibility is a critical metric for evaluating telecommunications systems, hearing devices, captioning accuracy, and public address systems for people with hearing loss. Unlike speech quality ratings, which are subjective, intelligibility provides an objective measure of whether communication is actually succeeding.