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Availability of Auracast on Phonak Sphere Infinio I90

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Hi all,

Approaching 18 years of hearing aid use and I am awaiting my delivery/fitting appointment for my Phonak Sphere Infinio I90s. I am coming from 10 yr old Resound hearing aids for mild/moderate high frequency bilateral hearing loss.

I see that the Spheres have the ERA chip which is " is Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) Audio enabled and -ready." As a producer of marketing materials in the past, and sensitive to market speak, I am wondering what this means. Bluetooth/Auracast do not list Phonak devices in their Auracast enabled list, and a July press release lists only Resound and Jabra as being Auracast “enabled.”

What does Phonak mean by this? Are they anticipating the possibility of enabling Auracast, or are the devices currently capable of receiving Auracast transmissions (the latter seems unlikely). Is there any other information on their plans viz. Auracast?

Thanks.

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The Bluetooth and will be available after a future firmware upgrade. So, yes, Infinios are ready for that technology, but you cannot use it now, only later.

We have a customer using Phonak Sphere 90 with his Samsung S23 phone. But when connected, there is no turn on option. Does anyone know why? I thought Phonak Sphere 90 is ready hearing aids.

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I visited an invite-only conference from Sonova a few weeks ago in the Netherlands, and there they told me they weren’t connfident in and yet, so they’re not sure yet when or if it’s going to be implemented, which is really unfortunate news. They’re also waiting to see if the other big names and theaters are going to implement it to see if there’a any adoption.

Thanks for sharing this information, yeah I have to say I’m very disappointed in the roll out, its been far too slow!

In reply to @Bailey72

This is helpful; thanks for sharing it.
Frustrating, though!
I wonder if making appealing to the general public wouldn’t help make it more of a priority with hearing aid manufacturers. Some sort of advertising campaign…

hi,

yeah very frustrating ! newer TV ( like LG and Samsung) does ! The technnology will come step to step

have so many advantage, low latency, high audio quality (and way better audio quality with microphone enabled when calling ! ), low battery usage etc…

i think LE Audio will replace A2DP and HSP bluetooth classic profile sonner than Phonak engineer think ! it’s a win-win for everyone !

Time will tell i hope we get the firmware. The sooner the better !

So if a manufacturer releases a product and promotes it as “ready for” /, can’t we take that as a commitment from that manufacturer to actually make it happen? It’s not like some third party can do it for them. I gave consideration to purchasing Phonak and one of the items in the “for” column was LE Audio. If I’d bought the aids and subsequently found out that Phonak were not commited to enabling LE Audio I’d be seriously annoyed.

I asked this question at yesterday’s AMA with Phonak.

Artificial Intelligence AMA with Senior Phonak Experts
Not directly about AI, but when will Auracast be available for the Spheres and will the Phonak app include an Auracast assistant similar to ReSound/Jabra? Will it support Auracast broadcasts with 48kbit/s bit rate? Many currently available Auracast transmitter only support 48kbit/s

Here is the response from Phonak’s @christine.jones who is VP Audiology Global Audiological Care (Sonova) & Sr Dir Marketing US (Phonak):

Artificial Intelligence AMA with Senior Phonak Experts
Auracast is a promising technology with great potential. Currently there are few places in the world that support it. The LE Audio protocol, of which Auracast is a part, is beneficial for hearing aids that use the ASHA standard. Classic Bluetooth, available in infinio products, is still the most established standard with millions of compatible devices and will likely remain the dominant standard for years to come. It allows for connection to up to 8 devices and 2 devices simultaneously and p…

I have to say, I found the response pretty disappointing. This doesn’t sound like a company who wants to be the leader!

There are plenty of inexpensive transmitters available for everybody to use right now, and you don’t have to wait until they are professionally installed everywhere.

In fairness though, it took ReSound more than a year from releasing capable Nexia , until they equipped their app with an Auracast assistant to make Auracast actually usable. But it’s available now and works well!

Neither Signia, Oticon, nor Starkey offer such an assistant yet.

Edited

I don’t give any of them a pass! It’s got to be over a year for Oticon now.

Starkey has been reported to use with the assistant build into the Samsung OS.

I thought the assistant in now built into the Android 16 OS. Plus, Samsung has had an assistant for over a year.

Frankly, they don’t have any good excuse now that Google as built an assistant into the OS. Hopefully, that starts the ball rolling at the rest of the hearing aid manufactures.

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