User Review of Whisper Hearing Aids

Some questions. Some of them may be dumb. I haven’t really ‘got’ machine learning at this point. I appreciate that you may have not used the device long enough to have an opinion on some of them.

Range?

Is there any learning of individual voices? For example, would you hear your significant other’s voice more clearly than others in a crowded room?

Is the effect of the brain instant or does it build? Corollary to this: If you turn off the brain while your’re in a challenging environment, does the effect linger? So is the receiver being primed in any way or is it instant-by-instant processing in the brain?

Is communication between the two devices reliable especially in spaces with lots of other devices communicating with each other? Would you know if it wasn’t?

Whether it constitutes a quantum leap or not, the fact that a company could start from scratch and, in only a few short years, produce a HA system that rivals or exceeds the performance of the best HAs from an established company is pretty impressive, in my opinion. I think it bodes well for the possibility of further significant improvements.

@billgem, a couple of questions: I assume your hearing a conversation 20 feet away at the soccer game happened while using the Whisper brain. Did you try turning off the brain to see what difference it might make?
Also, did your ability to hear a conversation 20 feet away that you weren’t necessarily trying to hear interfere with your ability to hear a speaker right in front of you whom you WERE trying to hear? Thanks for your comprehensive and extremely helpful posts.

@ziploc said:

Whether it constitutes a quantum leap or not, the fact that a company could start from scratch and, in only a few short years, produce a HA system that rivals or exceeds the performance of the best HAs from an established company is pretty impressive, in my opinion. I think it bodes well for the possibility of further significant improvements.

It’s easy to see how. They poached the VP and the sales guy and some engineers from Oticon to jockey and leap frog into the position they are right now. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s actually a smart move. Even a necessary move, I would say, to survive… But it doesn’t imply that they have genius-level technological prowess in-house which can produce rapid quantum leaps that would require a brain. At least not yet.

I’m not rooting for Whisper to fail, even though I’m expressing doubts about their need for a brain, from a technical point of view. Of course they need a differentiation to stand out and attract attention, or else it’d be hard to compete against the big 6. So that differentiation is their idea for a brain and their lease model. I think it’s a big gamble, and only time will tell if they’ll succeed.

Maybe one day if they’re successful enough to lower their subscription price to $50/month and they can install and run an app on my smartphone in place of a brain (using the app on the phone as the brain), that may be when I may jump in and sign up. Even if that means that I’d have to buy (and own outright) the ear pieces for a fixed low price ($1K/pair?) because it’s not part of the subscription lease to keep it down to $50/month. It’d be even better if there’s another option to pay to use the app per use event only, like only on days when I go out to a noisy restaurant and need the extra help from the brain. If I’m retired and at home on most days, I wouldn’t need or want to pay for that monthly premium brain service anyway, especially if the ear pieces are already a premium HA device on its own without the brain as advertised.

Here are direct links to the two white papers, Jim.

Just for you, Jim, I’m going to include an article which appeared in a Canadian journal, written by Don Schum:

An Introduction to the Whisper Approach | Canadian Audiologist13

The Official Publication of the Canadian Academy of Audiology

Sorry if I don’t respond to much over the next couple of days, but I’ll be tied up with doctors’ appointments. When I return, there will be a test on the assigned readings. (I’m a retired teacher. )

@billgem: Thanks very much, Bill. I’m enjoying following your journey, and learning a lot in the process.

Special good luck at the doc’s!

At my fitting I was told that all Whisper customers, not just early adopters, will get new hardware as it comes out.

@Volusiano: I agree wholeheartedly with what you’re saying in this latest post. I didn’t post to criticize you - I, and many others enjoy reading your articulate analyses (whether they’re strictly topical, or not).

I posted what I did in the open Forum because I thought it was becoming of us to let @d_Wooluf know that they had been heard by us, and that we (myself having been guilty of contributing to the significant drift of the last ill-fated Whisper thread) were not meaning to “descend down the same rat holes” we did, last time.

Like I said, I didn’t mean to level a criticism - least of all one pointed at you. I just though it was becoming and collegial to hoist the flag and signal to the other member that their request had been duly noted.

I trust that I have not offended you.

Not at all, Jim. I’ve never been offended by you and I doubt it’ll happen anytime, soon. I must admit that while I gave my responses to those side points being made, I was fully aware that I didn’t want to get into the same rabbit holes as the previous thread again. But nevertheless, because the door was open for those discussions, and I really have a strong opinion about those things that I want to say, so I took a chance to say it, at the risk of side tracking the thread.

Your post and @d_Wooluf’s posts were a welcome reminder for us all to keep things on track for this thread better than how we did in the last thread. So they’re appreciated and not offending anyone, at least not me. I also had a post where I promised @d_Wooluf that I’d try to refrain from unsolicited opinion. Most of my comments so far were kind of solicited, although the bit about $50/month with a per use-event and a brain inside a smart phone were indeed unsolicited opinion for sure, I must confess.

Thanks for sharing this balanced review @billgem ! Appreciate all the thought that went into it. It seems it has generated an interesting discussion here. I for one have been very curious to hear from legit users of the Whisper product (there don’t seem to be many in our communities), so this is especially valuable to me. And thanks to everyone else for engaging in a lively discussion !

@ziploc said:

@billgem, a couple of questions: I assume your hearing a conversation 20 feet away at the soccer game happened while using the Whisper brain. Did you try turning off the brain to see what difference it might make?

I did not, but I did switch to my Opn 1’s and could not hear that conversation.

@ziploc said:

Also, did your ability to hear a conversation 20 feet away that you weren’t necessarily trying to hear interfere with your ability to hear a speaker right in front of you whom you WERE trying to hear? Thanks for your comprehensive and extremely helpful posts.

It did not interfere with my ability to hear a nearby conversation. It’s that Oticon brain hearing concept. I was able to choose what to pay attention to, but it raised the same question in my mind. While Whisper does an excellent job separating speech noise from non-speech noise, I wondered about speech in a din becoming noise competition for the speech you want to hear. So, the Whisper system will not do what beamforming + suppression of background noise does.

In my example of hearing a conversation 20’ away in a banquet room, I was unable to hear a woman sitting 2 people away from me at our table. However, she is a classic “low talker” (see Seinfeld) and my wife, who can hear a pin drop 2 rooms away, had trouble hearing this woman, and my wife was sitting right next to her. I guess that some situations are just challenging for everyone, aided or unaided.

@x475aws: I did read this in your other thread. Can you think of a way that I could challenge my More1s with a similar situation? (What if I defrost something in the microwave and see whether they attenuate the magnetron when the turn “food over” beeper sounds?)

This is good news for me, as is DaBrain’s potentially-longer-than-16-hours charge capacity.

I’m sure Whisper will be able to increase this. [… I find this so challenging!]

@d_Wooluf said:

Some questions. Some of them may be dumb. I haven’t really ‘got’ machine learning at this point. I appreciate that you may have not used the device long enough to have an opinion on some of them.

Range?

Is there any learning of individual voices? For example, would you hear your significant other’s voice more clearly than others in a crowded room?

Is the effect of the brain instant or does it build? Corollary to this: If you turn off the brain while your’re in a challenging environment, does the effect linger? So is the receiver being primed in any way or is it instant-by-instant processing in the brain?

Is communication between the two devices reliable especially in spaces with lots of other devices communicating with each other? Would you know if it wasn’t?

1. There is no learning individual voices. As I understand it, the improvement of these hearing aids does not coming that kind of learning. The HAs have enhanced memory capabilities and digital information about your listening experiences is saved. This information falls into 2 categories: sources (voices) and environments. The types of information saved includes for voices: pitch, volume or intensity, harmonics (timbre), patterns & repetition, and variance (stationary vs non-stationary) and for environments: room size & shape, density (water vs air), surface quality (smooth vs spikes), materials (foam vs metal), and interfering objects. At quarterly audiology appointments, this information is downloaded by the audiologist and stored so that it can be combined with all other user data so that the system can be taught to improve its processing of sound under these various circumstances. At the next quarterly appointment, these collective improvements are then delivered to the individual user in the form of software upgrades.

2. The AI is used to learn speech patterns, which are unique as compared with any other kinds of noise, and then uses this recognition of speech sounds to separate it from background noise and emphasize it over the other background noises. This method has greater potential than frequency programming because non-speech noises which share the same frequency as certain speech sounds will receive the same emphasis as those speed sounds. As the AI learns speech characteristics, it can also make predictions where approximations are the only option and separate speech from noise based on this.

3. The only improvement of the brain is via the periodic software upgrades, similar to software upgrades on your smart phone or smart TV.

4. The Brain stays connected to the hearing aids whenever they are in proximity. It can’t be turned off when they are in the same space. When the brain is on, it adds the power of 5 additional processors to the processors in the ear pieces. When the brain is not connected, there are no lingering effects.

5. While I can’t say from personal experience, from what I’ve read communication between the brain and the ear pieces is reliable regardless of what other devices are operating in the same space. The engineers used cell phone technology to develop this system. They then developed a proprietary upgrade to eliminate any lag that exists in cell phone communication. So, ask yourself if your cell phone is reliable (as long as it can get a signal) in the presence of other competing devices. I have not experienced any problems with the connection or with any lag time.

I apologize in advance if I’ve made any errors in these explanations, but you can get a fuller explanation of these technical questions in the 2 white papers which I’ve linked in this thread.

Just reiterating that in the Webinar I saw, the question of who is eligible for new versions of hardware was addressed. Whoever addressed the question (Schum?) was quite specific that only Brains Trust participants were eligible.