A Large-Scale Database and Predictive Model of Listener-Rated Ease of Speech Understanding in Commercial Hearing Aids

HearAdvisor aims to provide hearing-aid consumers with audio-performance metrics and recordings that reflect real listening experience. For speech-related metrics, HearAdvisor has historically used HASPIv2, a metric designed to predict objective intelligibility and validated primarily under simulated distortions. Its relationship to consumer-rated ease of understanding for commercial hearing aids is uncertain. Here we introduce a large-scale perceptual dataset and learned metric for listener-rated perceived benefit for speech understanding. Website visitors with self-reported hearing loss completed a blind, MUSHRA-inspired listening test in which they rated recordings of commercial hearing aids on a five-point "Ease of Understanding" scale. The dataset contains 151,608 ratings, 104,298 after quality screening, spanning 10,394 binaural acoustic-manikin recordings from 83 commercial products across 72 realistic acoustic scenes. To predict these ratings, we pass aided audio and a matched clean-speech reference through a frozen Whisper encoder, subtract their internal representations, and train a small MLP head on the resulting difference embedding. On devices held out of training, the learned metric substantially outperforms HASPIv2 at the scene level (overall r = 0.92 vs. 0.83; loud = 0.89 vs. 0.75; quiet = 0.79 vs. 0.58). In loud scenes, performance reaches the split-half reliability of the listener ratings; in quiet scenes, it approaches that ceiling. The model also responds sensibly to controlled gain and SNR manipulations. Together, the dataset and model provide a new way to predict listener-rated ease of speech understanding for real commercial hearing-aid recordings.