Reckless Speculation AI in Hearing Aid Technology

From LinkedIn

WH

Wow! Real sourced information and not conjecture. Are you sure that’s ok with forum practice? :>)
(That was an attempt at sarcastic humor if not at all clear)

Schum sold folks on a technology that wasn’t ready in order to burnish his own credentials. that’s one way of looking at this. Yes, Whisper was intriguing. I myself would be willing to carry The Brain (patent pending) if it truly delivered better sound quality. But there was no way the company was ever going to meet the promises it made up front. Frankly I sensed a sham from the get-go.

I’m reminded of businessmen who know that bankruptcy is always a viable fall back position. They get to keep all of their own possessions while cheating workers and providers. They’re essentially users of other folks who are trying to do business in good faith. Folks like Schum abuse this privilege. I’d guess Schum may follow a similar pattern going forward. He’s come out smelling like a rose while Whisper clients are left holding the bag. I won’t be buying his products anytime soon.

@jeffrey, I recall you being involved in the Whisper discussions a while back, so I’m surprised you don’t know that Whisper customers received a full refund and had the option of keeping the aids for free.

I think you just crossed the line… Chum.

clever. And true!

And apparently Whisper customers did receive a full refund for their aids. A full refund isn’t want I’m hoping for when I buy hearing aids. I’m EXPECTING my aids to perform as advertised.Kudos to Whisper for refunding their few clients for purchasing their aids which will soon be entirely obsolete. They willingly participated in an experiment. they all bought in to a sales pitch and showed by the less than eager response that the model wouldn’t work. The participants are left with dead hearing aids; the sellers have gone on to a prestige position in Meta. What he hell does Meta care about developing hearing aids? wnat did Schum ever care, except that he could leverage this brand into a new career?
Beware of Sales Talk! it’s always bull crappy.

The Whisper AI argument has already been fought here and the wounds are still raw. My memory is that none of the Whisper users expressed rancour over the way they were treated. Personally, I don’t see what’s to gain by going through it again.

@jeffrey said:

What he hell does Meta care about developing hearing aids?

Augmenting the hearing aid3

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Apologies, I was in a bad mood or something. Whisper was odd and interesting. Glad they gave the idea a try.

Apology accepted.

Jeffrey, I got upset because the founders of Whisper dedicated 7 years of their lives to creating an innovation in the hearing aid market. It’s been a long time since anyone has done that from outside the corporate structure. We need innovation and I don’t think it’s helpful to dump on people who initiate new innovations, regardless of whether they succeed or fail.

It’s really hard to make a start up successful; fewer than 10% of start ups succeed at sustaining themselves. So, the deck was stacked against them before they began. They spent 4 years of research & development before they even had a product on the market and had any hopes of getting return on investment. That doesn’t strike me as people who are trying to scam the public.

@Um_bongo said:

If the might of the Matsushita corporation struggles, you can see why short lived start-ups aren’t going to succeed.

That’s why I was wondering about the ulterior motive of a startup like Whisper to begin with.

I know that many folks here have attested that they heard first hand from ‘insiders’ that Whisper actually did lose a lot of money as a matter of fact. But I still can’t help but wonder that Whisper is not dumb enough to not know how difficult it’d be to crack into the hearing aids market. So unless they’re secured enough funding to be able to make it all the way through, they should have anticipated the inevitability of a small startup like them running out of cash very quickly to not wade into this failing proposition in the first place. Yet they did it anyway, and Don Schum, as an old veteran in this business, even jumped ship from a lucrative career at Oticon to join them.

So I’m still not convinced of the picture they painted to folks, that they lost their shirt in trying to bring Whisper into the market. I think there’s more than meets the eye here than they want to let people think.

Don Schum was 61 years old when he left Oticon, so fairly late in his career. Combined with his succeeding move to Meta, it suggests to me that he is in a place right now where he is looking for new challenges and may have been done with the same old same old that he had been doing for 30 years. I don’t see any bug mystery here.

Whisper originally listed the price for their subscription at $179/month, but offered an introductory discounted price of $139/month. They never came close to getting the $179 and repeatedly discounted the $139. I paid $97/month. They finally offered a model with remote service for about $69/month. They originally presented their product as a high end line of hearing aids with a “concierge service” to provide customers with immediate answers to questions. It seems to me that they misread the marker. I know someone who has a contact at what was the highest level of Whisper’s inner circle. He was told that the decision to shut it down was purely financial. They simply never generated the revenue stream to support the business model which they established.

90% of start ups go out of business within the first 2 years. The reason is almost always money. Using Occum’s Razor, it would make sense that was the reason here. And I have it on good authority rpthat was in fact the reason. No reason to speculate unless there is new information.

I believe that it is a false hypothesis to state that they either had to be dumb or have an ulterior motive. And we know they’re not dumb, so . . .

The team who started Whisper came out of Silicon Valley, which is fertile with new ideas and where people run with a hot idea when they get it. That’s how Microsoft started. That’s how Apple started. That’s hoe Tesla started. And so many others. I remember when I read 20+ years ago that people in Japan were taking pictures with their phones. That seemed nutty to me Cameras had been around forever and would never be replaced ap with some device on your phone. But here we are 20 years later.

The folks at Whisper secured $53 million in funding. They were using proven technology which had been developed by Lantronix. They thought they had something which would take off, would disrupt the hearing aid industry. Obviously there were people like Don Schum, Jim Kothke, and Andre Bertelsen - all from Oticon - who agreed with them. They received a lot of encouragement along the way. Nonetheless, they knew that there were risks, but they were risk takers, so they jumped.

Unfortunately it didn’t work in terms of taking off and disrupting the industry with a new paradigm. I don’t see why that is so hard to believe. It happens all the time.

Only a tiny fraction of movie scripts which are written get purchased and only a small percent of those purchased screenplays actually get produced and get made into movies. Yet, despite the long odds, people keep writing screenplays and try to sell their scripts. Dumb?

For sure they were not dumb, and it’s possible that they didn’t have an ulterior agenda, so maybe they were simply hopelessly romantic about believing that they were going to be able to disrupt the HA industry like they thought. I have no idea what kind of burn rate such an outfit would go through to make their initial funding of $53 M last, but it doesn’t seem much to begin with, especially if you factor in the cost of hardware manufacturing because it’s not just IP development only here for sure.

At any rate, I’m not sure if the analogy of movie screenplays fits well in here, though, because the investment for a movie screenplay is probably peanut in terms of its ROI (usually a one-man band writing it) that it would make the high risk worthwhile, compared to a $54M start-up fund. Whoever shelled out that kind of money for Whisper would probably have to think twice next time about funding another HA startup company again.

Again, false dichotomy. Dumb or hopelessly romantic? You choose.

Here’s an article from October, 2020, the month that Whisper hearing aids were launched, which show the thinking at that time - when the Oticon More with its DNN hadn’t yet seen the light of day. Two contributors to this article were also investors in Whisper.

Whisper: Hearing the World Intelligently | IVP7