The 5G spec allows for one-way latency as low as 1 millisecond(ms) for “ultra-reliable low latency communication” setups although typical allowed latency is 4 ms.
According to Wikipedia, up to 200 ms latency in audio devices is considered tolerable:
Apparently we live with a fair amount of latency already built into various audio devices, according to Wikipedia. Interestingly, every 588 km of transmission distance to be covered has a built-in one-way latency of 3 ms (signal traveling at 2/3 speed of light). So having a powerful AI processor close by would keep round-trip latency via 5G down to a manageable size while still allowing 10’s of ms of processing time on the signal before delay became bothersome.
Maybe 5G chews up too much battery to work on a hearing aid but if one’s phone were not powerful enough to handle the AI processing, it’s conceivable the phone could add off to some other processor or servers not too far away via 5G and the whole process could still be in the tolerable latency range.
Tried to look up latency considerations in human perceptions of lips moving vs. sound to see how much out-of-sync tolerance there is there. Seems like from what little I read that if you can see a speaker’s lips moving, less latency would be tolerable there as a paper that I glanced at claimed that humans use visual cues to shorten audio recognition latency. So if you were only listening to words being spoken more audio latency might be tolerable (kinda like early satellite phone conversations where even with slight delays, you could still get by?).
Update: Found audio being out of sync with visual is defined as “lip sync error.” Although shorter times for audio lagging video are recommended in TV and film standards, an expert panel of reviewers found that the threshold detection for audio lagging visual is 125 ms.
So that gives a decent time cushion for an AI processor to massage speech and get the improved version to the HA before the listener perceives any disturbing lip sync error in face-to-face communications.