1y ago

Hearing aids may be about to find a new market - young people with no hearing loss. Starkey says AI in its new hearing aids means they can make phone calls and translate languages

scrippsnews.com Thanks to AI, hearing aids offer translation, other high-tech features

A Minneapolis-based company uses AI to give hearing aids cool features like real-time language translation, fall detection and alerts.

At first, an in-ear phone and language translator, while useful, might not seem compelling. But take things a bit further. This relies on a mini-computer and connection to the internet in the hearing aid. What if that allowed you to connect to Chat-GPT? Or future more powerful versions of it. That might be more compelling. Sci-fi has often envisioned cyborgs in the future. Maybe one day people will look back at stuff like this and think it was the first baby steps of that technology.

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23 comments

Hmm, I guess, potentially interesting for migrants / asylum seekers, who struggle with even just understanding the language.
Can't really imagine anyone buying these for phone calls, when regular earphones, or you know, just holding your phone to your ear, already exist.
It's kind of even an anti-feature for phone calls, if people can't see these hearing aids. Everyone will think you're crazy, talking to yourself...
- My partner speaks a native language which is extremely rare - only a few million people worldwide speak the language. So uncommon that it's hard to find software to teach me the language. A real-life babble-fish would make life a million times easier when visiting her family who doesn't speak English (I assume, since I know that AI including Chat is capable of translating to and from the language fairly well with good grammar, but I doubt that it would be able to easily synthesize speech patterns for a rare language compared to converting their language to English. But I could be wrong lol.
  
  What language is it, sounds interesting
  
  One of the Baltics
- Think about tuning out annoying people or sounds. Turning up volume on people who are low talkers. Turning down loud people.
  Phones are heavy and my pixel 6 wrecks my hand if I hold it for too long. Hearables are the future I envision. Glad it's coming to fruition
  
  Bluetooth headphones do that already for a fraction of the price though... there's even Bluetooth monitors for musicians that can selectively block certain frequencies/amplify certain sounds. Calling this a 'hearing aid' just seems like an attempt to cash in on insurance money/charge a premium because then it's in a category of 'medical devices' rather than just consumer electronics.
  
  Sorry which Bluetooth headphones do this ? I've not seen anything like this. Can you post a link
  
  I just have cheap ones, the anker pro life p3, but they have noise cancelation and selective settings for pass-through, so you can select what is amplified and played back through the headphones, but I assume more expensive ones have more detailed settings. They don't translate things on their own, but if some 'hearing aid' manufacturer has the ability and software to do that in real time (which I mostly doubt) then there would also exist software to do that from the phone they're connected to.
  https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/electronics/best-in-ear-monitors-876600/
  
  That is fascinating. So you can increase and decrease the volume of speakers? I know of house cancelation and I knew some higher ends could increase the clarity of voice versus other noises. But that's a new ballgame

23 comments