Perceived quality of experience for speech listening is influenced by cognitive processing and can affect a listener's comprehension, engagement and responsiveness. Quality of Experience (QoE) is a paradigm used within the media technology community to assess media quality by linking quantifiable media parameters to perceived quality. The established QoE framework provides a general definition of QoE, categories of possible quality influencing factors, and an identified QoE formation pathway. These assist researchers to implement experiments and to evaluate perceived quality for any applications. The QoE formation pathways in the current framework do not attempt to capture cognitive effort effects and the standard experimental assessments of QoE minimize the influence from cognitive processes. The impact of cognitive processes and how they can be captured within the QoE framework have not been systematically studied by the QoE research community. This article reviews research from the fields of audiology and cognitive science regarding how cognitive processes influence the quality of listening experience. The cognitive listening mechanism theories are compared with the QoE formation mechanism in terms of the quality contributing factors, experience formation pathways, and measures for experience. The review prompts a proposal to integrate mechanisms from audiology and cognitive science into the existing QoE framework in order to properly account for cognitive load in speech listening. The article concludes with a discussion regarding how an extended framework could facilitate measurement of QoE in broader and more realistic application scenarios where cognitive effort is a material consideration.

Subjective listening tests are routinely conducted by academic researchers and industry professionals to assess the quality of various speech and audio processing algorithms and transmission services. Listening tests often take place in controlled environments for the sake of consistency, but in many cases, listening tests could be undertaken remotely using a suitable web interface. Despite the work of several projects in the past, there is no publicly available, fully hosted listening test platform which allows for easy test creation, deployment and data collection. Here, we present a fully functional end-to-end listening test platform which allows a user to create and share MUSHRA, ACR and A/B tests within minutes. Collected data can then be downloaded in various forms. For users who would prefer to host the system on their own servers, we provide Docker and AWS images for easy installation.

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