Amsterdam, Netherlands (September 11, 2026)―A group of audio metering manufacturers have joined forces with Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology to develop a dialog intelligibility implementation framework.
Nugen Audio, RTW, Steinberg and Telos Alliance have formed the LEAP Meter Manufacturers Group (LMMG) and together with Fraunhofer IDMT have developed the LMMG Dialog Intelligibility Implementation Agreement. Presented at IBC 2026, the agreement defines a common implementation framework for products based on LEAP, Fraunhofer IDMT’s AI-based technology for objectively assessing the perceived intelligibility of spoken content.
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The initiative addresses an increasingly important challenge across television, radio, streaming, podcasts and other speech-based media: audiences struggling to understand dialog.
Traditional audio measurements, such as level and loudness, provide essential information about an audio signal, but they do not directly indicate how well listeners can understand speech. LEAP takes a different approach by estimating the listening effort required to understand dialog, providing audio professionals with an objective indication of perceived dialog intelligibility.
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As LEAP is integrated into products from different manufacturers, the participating companies identified the need to ensure that users receive comparable results regardless of which product or platform they are using. Although products may use the same underlying algorithm, differences in signal processing, downmixing, scaling, smoothing, terminology and visualization can otherwise lead to differences in how measurements are presented and interpreted.
The LMMG Dialog Intelligibility Implementation Agreement establishes a shared set of recommendations designed to provide consistency across implementations. Under the agreement, participating manufacturers have standardized key aspects of their implementations, including the use of “Dialog Intelligibility” as the common terminology and DIU (Dialog Intelligibility Unit) as the unit for customer-facing measurements.
LEAP results are mapped to a common scale from 0 to 100 DIU, with higher values representing better dialog intelligibility and lower listening effort. The agreement also defines common reference thresholds and color ranges, signal processing and downmixing requirements, smoothing and the handling of non-dialog content.
The result is a common foundation that allows dialog intelligibility measurements made using products from different manufacturers to be directly compared and consistently interpreted.