Method and apparatus of increasing speech intelligibility in noisy environments

A method and apparatus for enhancing the intelligibility of speech emitted into a noisy environment. After filtering ambient noise with a filter that simulates the physical blocking of noise by a at least a part of a voice communication device a frequency dependent SNR of received voice audio relative to ambient noise is computed on a perceptual (e.g. Bark) frequency scale. Formants are identified and the SNR in bands including certain formants are modified with formant enhancement gain factors in order to improve intelligibility. A set of high pass filter gains is combined with the formant enhancement gains factors yielding combined gains which are clipped, scaled according to a total SNR, normalized, smoothed across time and frequency and used to reconstruct an audio signal.