Tried the Starkey Livio Edge AI yesterday, and don't understand what I found

@jim_lewis: That’s a fair point, and well taken.

I’m sure the issue was raised on account of sloppiness on my part (I should have searched the Forum before making that assertion - you’re right to pull me over for it. You make several other illuminating points, too).

Hence, I have edited my post for greater accuracy and clarity. I apologize for my mis-step.

Thanks everyone for your comments and opinions. It’s what keeps this place real which i like.
I have good faith in my audiologist and put my trust in her hands. I have signed up for a 3 year service package. It’s the start of a long journey. You people have been great!

Congratulations, @Deafas. May you have as good results from your hearing instruments as I have with mine!

@bluejay2025 said: (unavailable)

According to Starkey when I called it allowed Edge to learn and apply the best fit for that situation.

This statement is very vague and doesn’t really explicitly implies self learning.

“Allowing Edge to learn” can simply means to activate it so that it can start analyzing (or learn) the current environment the user is in to match it up with what’s in a pre-built database.

“Apply the best fit for that situation” is what it is, once the situation of the current environment has been analyzed and classified (or “learned”), it finds the matching situation in the pre-built database, then extract the parameters pre-defined to be best suited for that situation and apply those parameters’ settings to your hearing aids.

So, just a simple statement like that from Starkey doesn’t mean that the hearing aid can really self learn.

Training a neural network (like what Oticon did with the More), or using AI to build a smart database (like what I think Starkey did with the Livio Edge) is not the same as self learning. If you wear the hearing aid for 3 years, then it crapped out and you have to get new replacements, the replacement hearing aid will perform exactly the same as the original hearing aid. The original hearing aid does not get any smarter than the replacement hearing aid just because it’s had 3 years of self-learning experience from being worn by yourself, while the replacement hearing aid has 0 experience because it’s never been worn. The trained/accumulated “smart” is already built into all hearing aids just the same. They don’t evolve and self-learn individually to become different from each other at their core. Sure they’ll have different personalized settings stored, but their core smart is all the same and one HA does not take on a different experience from another as they progress over the years.

I think real self learning requires a very complex and self-sustaining digital eco-system that’s not easily fit inside a tiny chip of a tiny hearing aid.

I’m not arguing that the Livio Edge doesn’t do self-learning. I’m just saying that I don’t see any evidence of it described in its whitepaper, and the statement from Starkey about “allowing Edge to learn” does not imply self-learning for me.

Now the Widex Evoke claims self-learning, and I would buy that claim. That’s because they use their smartphone app to establish connectivity between the hearing aid back to their cloud based system. The user, by being presented with an A/B choice of settings, then to tell the system which is preferred for his/her current environment, would have their A/B choice along with the environmental data fed back through the phone app to the Widex cloud, into their self-learning eco-system, to train it better and better using connectivity with their hundreds of thousands of users (or millions? I don’t know how many they sold so far) over more and more exposure to more and more environmental data and more and more users’ preferences learned, and over more and more time, now that’s self-learning.

Maybe the Starkey Livio Edge AI does the “pushing” of data back into the Starkey cloud, but it’s not obvious to me through the whitepaper. Widex, on the other hand, is very explicit about this in their marketing claims. It seems like the Livio Edge is “pulling” from the database, and this database is either stored in the hearing aid or in the Starkey cloud and gets pulled through the Thrive control app. That part (where the database resides) is not clear to me.

Thank you for your informative posts as they raise good debates and you make the Starkey livio edge sound exciting! Dr Cliff Olsen mentioned that some people will be buying the livio edge customs even though they don’t have hearing loss. His comments made me laugh as I highly doubt it at $8000 but i must admit they will make good earbuds for everyone. I have asked you many questions and you have been generous enough to reply to each one even though I have no recent experience wearing hearing aids. I will hope to share with you my findings too with the custom Starkey livio edge 2400s.

Just a little update to let you guys know that i have found out it is good to have a little earwax in the ears. For many years I kept them clean inside the canals using cotton tips. Since I stopped eating fatty foods 4 years ago due to oesophageal reflux i dont use cotton tips anymore as i dont produce hardly any wax. Since wearing in the canal amplifier aids in the past 3 months I was told by my audiologist that I may have a fungus in my ear. I can understand this is due to the tight dome fitting causing moisture buildup after 6 hrs daily use. My doctor told me that it is not a fungus but mild irritation and prescribed me a cream which is mostly antibacterial with little anti fungal ingredients. I think my audio is right as we could see small white spots in one of my ears in the canal. Anyway the point of my post is that A little wax in the ears prevents fungus growth for those who wear itc/ite and dome inserts. Fungus cannot grow when there is earwax lining the canal.

@Deafas: Here’s a link to a helpful little writeup by the Mayo Clinic

Earwax blockage - Symptoms & causes - Mayo Clinic6

[Don’t let the title fool you - it’s about way more than just blockage, such as the benefits of cerumen, its composition, etc. Anybody who is interested can find a ton of useful information just by Quacking “cerumen”.]

@rbahr1900 said:

Is this correct? One just jumps in and there is no real initial evaluation other than perhaps cost and connectivity.

This is tangential to the discussion, but I would be interested to see how consumers think that this should best work.

There are a lot of people who come on the forum feeling like it is appropriate that they should get to test drive multiple devices, and it feels like the assumption is that they should be able to do this at no charge. It is certainly the case that you cannot truly compare two devices unless they have been appropriately fit for you, so trialing a bunch of first fits from different manufacturers is only KIND of a real trial. Appropriately fit hearing aids are both a device and a professional service. So, in trialing multiple devices, where should the cost of those professional services go? Does it make sense to you to pay a setup fee for each different device you try, or does it make more sense to have that cost rolled into the final purchase so that when you are buying a hearing aid you are actually paying for an average number of multiple trials?

It would be nice to see a new post about any peoples experience with the Widex evoke hearing aids. Ai + machine learning (data upload and download from the cloud). When I asked about Widex My audiologist didn’t recommend this brand. I’m not sure why but I accept her decision.

Audiologists have their preferences. Honestly, though, the differences between modern hearing aids are razor thin and if the hearing aids are appropriate and correctly fit, most users will do well with most of them. Widex has historically been a smaller company with smaller market share, and you can probably translate that into it being recommended less frequently.

My surely personal and limited view of Widex is that they have had some very clever people who have created some clever features that have led to a strong history of clear sound. However, bigger manufacturers with perhaps more power to move quickly have watched what Widex has done and followed suit such that the things that used to differentiate Widex hearing aids (e.g. 6 years ago they were pretty much the hearing aid for musicians) no longer do.

As a new hearing aid customer I would ideally rather pay a setup fee for each hearing device and try them for one week each for a couple of months. The reality is it is all rather time consuming as it means multiple fitting appointments for each device, longer trial periods especially if there are a few brands on devices being trialled. Then having adjustments after the fitting. In the end I believe the current setup of 60 day trial works best for each device as it allows for adjustments during the trial period.

BTW, one groundbreaking aspect of Starkey was that it was the first hearing aid company to offer an extensive trial period: Starkey Hearing Technologies - Wikipedia2.