It's not well known but I have a speech processing issue. I have a really hard time decyphering audio for voice communication. It's so bad I rely on sub titles to watch video content with speech as well as read lips in meat space when with others.
My problem works like this: my hearing is good (I hear noises just fine) but I cannot hear people speak in terms of words. That seems odd, correct. I **know** a human is talking at me but all I hear is the sound of their voice, not words. It's like hearing a guitar in a song, it's noise but not words (speech).
This problem is exacerbated by background noise of any form. A video game, voices, the sound of the ocean, anything will cause this issue of mine to worsen.
I also have had tinnitus since I was a small child. So long I cannot rememer a time before it existed for me. Tinnitus is a kind of background noise and exacerbates my speech issue as well.
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## Historic Coping Skills
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If you've met me before, you know I'm not all that young, this hasn't been a 'thing' (as far as you knew ;) ) and you're probably surprised right now.
In meat space I make sure the people I talk to are facing me and I'm facing them and I read their lips. If the other person or people have their back to me, I cannot hear anything except on the rare occassion I can focus hard enough to process the speech. I'm deaf to **speech** in this situation by default now.
The separation of background and voice has been critial for me with phones, particularly cell phones. It's also why I cannot handle audio books.
The fix for me for cell phones was ear pieces/buds to isolate the **voice** from the background for my brain. I also discovered my **right** ear is the one that can process voices, not the left for whatever reason. If I use an ear piece for voice audio on my phone I can [generally] hear the other person or people.
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## New Coping Skills
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Over the years I've clearly developed and honed a number of coping skills. Unfortunately, I need a bit more help day to day at this point. I need to develop new methods that help me with speech, especially for my growing number of conference calls using full video and voice. I also play a game with others regularly which requires game audio and voice communications to be isolated for my speech processing needs.
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## A Fix
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Thankfully Windows 10 has a way to address this need built into the operating system.
For my fix you can see the [Split voice and game audio]({{< ref "/tips/tech-split-audio.md" >}}) for details on how I improved my situation.
