Abstract: Systems and methods are provided for generating and operating a speech enhancement model optimized for generating noise-suppressed speech outputs for improved human listening and live captioning. A computing system obtains a speech enhancement model trained on a first training dataset to generate noise-suppressed speech outputs and an automatic speech recognition model trained on a second training dataset to generate transcription labels for spoken language utterances. A third training dataset comprising a set of spoken language utterances is applied to the speech enhancement model to obtain a first noise-suppressed speech output which is applied to the automatic speech recognition model to generate a noise-suppressed transcription output for the set of spoken language utterances.