Cochlear, page-2

https://patents.justia.com/patent/10157629

Here is the link to the patent for those wanting to have a read.

As far as I can see, the objective of this patent is to identify voice commands taking up less processing power and using low power.
People will be familiar with "Hey Google", "Hey Siri".

Artificial cochlea referred to in the patent is 'artificial'. Meaning it exists in software. This is not referred to a physical hearing aid.
The voice is converted into PCM packets and sent to the 'artificial' cochlea where it is processed using SNN.

The digital microphone 102 is connected via a digital interface 214 to the decimation filter 108. When any speech activity occurs, the digital microphone 102 captures the speech signal and sends the captured speech or audio signal to the decimation filter 108. The output of the digital microphone 102 is in Pulse Density Modulation (PDM) format, which is a single bit digital signal. The decimation filter 108 converts the pulse density modulation signal, received from the digital microphone 102 at a clock rate with a defined range, into a pulse code modulation signal (PCM), which is a multi-bit packet format. The defined range of the clock rate may be, but not limited to, 6 kHz to 6 MHz. The PCM packets are received by the artificial cochlea 206, which produces temporal and spatial distributed output spike streams. The artificial cochlea 206 is a device that models human cochlea with emphasis on voice band. The output spike streams from the artificial cochlea 206 are fed to the first spiking neural network 210 and then the second spiking neural network 212present in the spiking neuron adaptive processor (SNAP) 208.




I can not say whether the company Cochlear is Brainchip's NDA customer or not but this patent has no connection to the event.