Phonak Audéo Sphere

I’m going to assume those are lithium batteries in the Spheres.

The killer of batteries is heat. Throwing on a charger while internally warm is a battery life killer.

Just a reminder about battery care.

@nope said: (unavailable)

A model is essentially trained on a bunch of samples where you have sounds, speech, lack of speech, etc. and run though filters. Those samples are tagged as having speech or not having speech and the DNN figures out what characteristics of the sound are speech. It then will make a model with those characteristics built into it that can pass what the HA mics are picking up, pick out the speech based on the model, and then present to the user the sound patterns that have been identified as speech (this is super dumbed down but more or less what is happening).

So, as previously suggested, this isn’t “AI”, but just another set of algorithms? It does, however, appear to be a good set though.

Peter

This is not correct; Phonak is certainly advertising both “Auracast ready” and I’ve heard directly from my phonak contact that Bluetooth LE Audio is on the menu.
What’s not clear is whether it will become available in a firmware update, or whether it will ship with it initially. I meet with my contact tomorrow for a beer so I’ll ask more

• The normal human hearing range is 20 Hz - 20,000 Hz, however hearing aids for the longest time have only really focused on amplifying the speech range (125 - 8000 Hz), and this range is even less for higher powered devices.
• Recent technological advances in hearing aid receiver design now make it possible to amplify higher than 8000 Hz.
• There are arguments that amplifying higher frequencies are especially important in pediatric fittings, where a child needs to clearly hear the s and th sounds, so they can properly learn and reproduce speech. Having receivers that have extended high frequency range are therefore quite important with that regard.
• there also may be benefits to perception of music, for perception of vertical directionality, or if you’re fitting hearing aids to dogs and cats
• All i know is that in my years of fitting hearing aids, there has not been a time where increasing gain in the highest frequency channels has ever sparked joy from the wearer EXCEPT FOR a young violinist when tuning her music listening program.

There are tinnitus sufferers which need high frequencies [beyond 8kHz] to mask it. Being one of them I went with Signias which offer ~10-12kHz.
8kHz is just lazy and inconsiderate at his point.

I’ve been speculating that if Bluetooth LE or future improvements have sufficiently low latency, the processing power in one’s phone which is many times greater than the HA chip could be harnessed in ways that are way ahead of what is currently feasible.

@bigaltavista said:

However AI processing simply has too much power consumption and battery drain for it to be a reality. Perhaps as smartphones become more powerful, a hearing aid could offload processing there, however it would still be loaded with potential issues which is why edge based AI processing will always be preferred.

It changes a bit with dedicated NPUs in recent modern devices and I’m certain that Phonak is cooking remote mics with AI+NPUs inside.
You basically need a Phone with a decent array of mics and NPU sound processing. Sound processing AIs aren’t particularly heavy. Latencies aren’t an issue when properly done and transmitted over BLE-A.
Actually I’m expecting something like this to popup in the Pixel range soon, since it has both NPU, offline LMMs and Google’s accessibility services like Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier.

What I meant is that we already have the hardware, in the form of a recent smartphones. There are actually generic white-label smartphones which get repurposed as feature devices, music players and so on. They’re basically just a compute units with a screen. Assistive AI mic would be just one of the possible variants/implementations.
Which just reminded me that I’ve seen one project recently doing just that.

Thank you. you explained everything to me in detail :), means that this option is unnecessary for me because I won’t be able to use it.

Are the hearing aids the same I think if you were to compare the possibilities for severe hearing loss., I am currently using Phonak Audeo Paradise and for me it is close to the upper limit in high frequencies. Are Paradise and Sphere equal in terms of sound amplification?

@markoo355 said:

Are Paradise and Sphere equal in terms of sound amplification?

Yes 105dB is the max it’ll go too. All Audeo from Phonak have a limit of 105dB.

@PeterH said:

What I didn’t realise, was that Target had enabled SoundRecover2 as default. The sound coming out of my amplifier sounded absolutely awful, to the point I asked the others, who said it sounded fine. I removed my HAs for the remainder of the rehearsal!

My loss is around 70-80dB in the higher frequencies, so I’ve found I don’t need SoundRecover2 (yet).

As you can see from my audiogram, I absolutely need SoundRecover2.

I was wondering (perhaps foolishly): since the Sphere with UP receiver has a frequency range up to 8K while my P90s reach 6K, is there a way to disable SoundRecover2? Or, since both the Sphere and the P90 have a limit of 105db, will I always need SoundRecover2?

SoundRecover2 is a checkbox in Target. How to programme it is a mystery to me, but I’d certainly say it can be disabled.

Sound Recover 2 can be disabled. For you to “hear” high frequencies I’m pretty confident you will need Sound Recover 2. I suspect that even if a hearing aid could generate enough gain at high frequencies that all you would hear is distortion. When they do your audiogram and they test high frequencies at loud volume, do you still hear tones or is it more of a staticky, distorted sound? If the latter, it suggests cochlear dead spots.

@MDB said:

When they do your audiogram and they test high frequencies at loud volume, do you still hear tones or is it more of a staticky, distorted sound?

I still hear the tones