Costco will stop selling the Rexton Reach and replace it with the Sennheiser Sonite

@x475aws said:

If there are no details online about Sennheiser Sonite R then the chatbot answers must be hallucinations. I guess there could be online info that’s been crawled by chatbots but not Google et al. Don’t know how likely that is.

Interesting to post a negative view and then within your own post provide an answer as to how a massive search engine could know something you don’t or can’t find yourself on the Internet.

I think it’s possible to infer from the Costco bulletin info revealed in the Reddit post that DNN is not likely to be in the Sonite R. Phonak and Oticon have bragged for years that AI is used to train the automatic program and parameter switching in their HAs. The fact that the Costco bulletin mentions AI is consistent with this well-known past use of AI in programming modern hearing aids. It’s the enthusiastic readers of the bulletin adding in, “This could mean the Sonite R contains DNN!!!”

Shows where human hallucinations factor in just as much as AI hallucinations. Wait 'til Monday or whenever and find out for sure.

I believe these will be more like Lumity than Infinio… One of the redditors made this point:

“There’s a photo of the model circulating from one of their corporate emails. It shows the hearing aid, and the microphones give it away. They have the single mic under the buttons, not the dual mics like the Infinio.”

Oh man that’s so disappointing, who wants old models now, I guess people will have to wait until this time next year to get infinio or sphere!

Google Gemini claims they are derived from the OTC Sennheiser All Clear line - but those only cost ~$1K. I guess the Sonite R come in models with a higher fitting range and perhaps the increased price factors in the professional care you don’t get with the OTC line.

I really love my KS9s, but one place they really fail is wind noise reduction. The only way to reduce wind noise is wear a headband. From the picture posted, I am hoping these Sonite might do better.

I think there’s a fair chance of that. Ear Gear also helps but can be a bit of a pain to use.

In my experience, AI has been the most unreliable when asking about recent events or products. I would completely disregard anything AI has to say about Sonite R. In a few years, it will have more recent “memories” to query.

@jim_lewis, I’m saying that I doubt the chatbots have a valid basis for saying the Sennheiser doesn’t have the Sphere’s advanced DNN. I think it’s the right result, but they got there by accident. Maybe the LLM field has a more precise word than “hallucination” for this situation.

My guess is that the chatbots, which are good at finding obscure stuff like you said, came across “Sennheiser Sonite R” in the government records you mentioned. If those records don’t mention “DNN”, then the chatbots’ operation, in the absence of any other online info about Sonite R, might conclude the Sonite R is lacking DNN. But do government compliance records include hearing aid operational features, or just the mandatory regulatory stuff? If the latter, then the bots are wrong to conclude anything about features from government records. I don’t think bots understand the kind of data they’re looking at, they just work with sequences of words.

Does this sound plausible to you?

@AbramBaileyAuD said:

I believe these will be more like Lumity than Infinio… One of the redditors made this point:

Without Sphere, Abram, Infinio is simply the next generation of Lumity. So I think your comment is spot on.

@jeffrey said:

I’m surprised to not hear more regrets about the loss of Rexton. My impression is that these were pretty popular.
I’m also curious as to who abandoned who–Costco or Signia, or vice versa–and why. Didn’t Rexton come in as a repalcement for another highly popular brand at Costco that stopped selling there–and not that long ago?

That’s a great question, Jeffrey. It’s surprising that they woukd drop a product which they only introduced about 5 months ago.

Costco has been offering Rexton brand hearing aids for years. My first contact with Costco for hearing aids was in 2015, and Rexton was part of the lineup back then. If I’m not mistaken, I think that Rextons were sold under the Kirkland house brand for a few years, so they may appear to be a more recent addition for that reason.

With Jabra, Philips, and Sennheiser, all of Costco’s offerings will be brand names which didn’t exist in the hearing aid market 5 or 6 years ago.

@NateS said:

I have Rexton Reach BTEs

I can’t find them, your using ear hook or slim tube with your BTE models?

Google Gemini reply to my query: “How can you know about the Sennheiser Sonite R hearing aid?”

The Sennheiser Sonite R is a hearing aid that is currently in development and will be available through Costco. It is expected to be a high-quality hearing aid with advanced features, including automatic sound identification and adaptation, directional beamforming, and Bluetooth connectivity.
I have access to information about the Sennheiser Sonite R through various sources, including:

• Reddit: There are discussions about the Sennheiser Sonite R on Reddit’s HearingAids forum.
• HearingTracker: This forum also has discussions about the Sennheiser Sonite R.
• FDA.report: This website lists the Sennheiser Sonite R as a registered medical device.
  I can also access information about other Sennheiser hearing aids, such as the Sennheiser All-Day Clear, which is an over-the-counter hearing aid. This information can help me understand the technology and features that may be included in the Sennheiser Sonite R.
  However, it is important to note that the Sennheiser Sonite R is not yet available on the market, so there is limited information available about its specific features and performance. As more information becomes available, I will be able to provide more details about this hearing aid.

So much for not being up-to-date.

Gemini and Perplexity operate differently from ChatGPT… Gemini uses a knowledge base akin to Google’s index which is more real time… However, as you can see, it knows nothing more than what we knew already from the forums… And so I wouldn’t expect any new insights. When I said “years” earlier, I was exaggerating a bit, and thinking more of ChatGPT which literally knows nothing that happened after Oct 2023 or something. But I stand by saying it’s premature to expect anything from AI right now. It’s too early to get anything useful. You can read every word on the topic in two forums in a matter of minutes. And I think a human educated on this topic is probably better at sifting through all the speculation than an AI…

The difference is the AI evaluated the same information and concluded that the Sonite Rs are not likely to contain DeepSonic noise reduction. The humans went gaga and concluded it might be the Costco version of the Sphere on little basis.

IIRC, The KS9s and the KS10s were released ~ one year after the Marvels and the Paradises, respectively. How likely is a Costco Sphere equivalent to show up TWO MONTHS after the release of the Phonak brand?!

If you check out the Reddit thread now, the Costco bulletin has been deleted from the first post:

Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it.