Transforms Hearing Aids Into Smart Wearables
April 16, 2019 6:10 PM   Subscribe

AI hearing aid translates 27 languages in real-time and also doubles as a hands-free earpiece. The language translation works in conjunction with a smartphone app. If an English speaker wearing the device says something to a Chinese speaker, the Livio AI system would translate the words and display them in Chinese characters on the English speaker’s smartphone screen. If the Chinese speaker said something in return, those words would be directly translated into spoken English in the ears of the hearing aid wearer.

The ideal customer might be someone who is reasonably tech-savvy and comfortable with using smartphone apps, and perhaps has a relatively active lifestyle. At the end of the day, some people may not need the “fully loaded Lamborghini” of hearing aids and may simply want the basics, Sawalich says.

But for people who are already seriously contemplating spending thousands of dollars on ordinary hearing aids, the capabilities of the Livio AI hearing aid could prove enticing. After all, why reach for the smartphone in the pocket or strap on smart watches and fitness trackers when your hearing aid is already along for the ride?
posted by dancestoblue (40 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wow. That would have come in really handy when tutoring ESL students and when traveling.

Bet no insurance covers it though and costs more than my automobile ::sigh::
posted by CrowGoat at 6:18 PM on April 16, 2019


So... a Babelfish?
posted by lhauser at 6:32 PM on April 16, 2019 [38 favorites]


Are its translations significantly better than Google Translate? 'Cause you can get some weird stuff out of Google Translate. Google Translate is still somewhere between the Babelfish and the Hungarian Phrasebook sketch.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 6:49 PM on April 16, 2019 [9 favorites]


Bet no insurance covers it though and costs more than my automobile ::sigh::

Insurance has never covered my regular, non-translating hearing aids, so that would be correct.
posted by acidnova at 6:50 PM on April 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


Or maybe we’ll all keep using Google Translate on our cell phones.

In case anyone who doesn’t use real-time automated translation is wondering: it ain’t there yet. You can dress the technology up in all sorts of hardware, but a) speech recognition still demands proofreading and b) the actual translation — I use English to Spanish, which is reputed to be one of the easier combos — still results in confusion about 25% of the time.

On the plus side there continues to be steady progress on both fronts. Another 10 years and we may have something.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:52 PM on April 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


Apple’s Airpods are able to be used in an assistive listening mode; I imagine it would be possible to see them (or google) add a similar feature. This may eventually end up like the standalone GPS or consumer camcorder- eaten by software.
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:53 PM on April 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


Today, Starkey Hearing Technologies unveiled an AI-powered hearing aid that fits snugly into your ear,

Cool.

...automatically translates foreign languages,

Wow, awesome.

...and tracks both your physical and mental health.

Nope.
posted by pompomtom at 7:15 PM on April 16, 2019 [11 favorites]


I for one don't care at all if it works well at translating, as a young person with hearing damage. If Apple can manage to make it somewhat normal for people to have smartwatches that are pretty dumb, and dumb looking, then if these people can make it not a seriously odd or worse, douchey looking, thing to wear a hearing aid of any kind as a younger person, that'd be fucking awesome. Additionally, I hope that efforts to increase the upper level of hearing care might help drive down the prices of the ALD systems and tests that are required for actual proper hearing aids, which are a medical prosthetic and do require fitting to work properly.

In short, please, rich tech nerds, dive deep into this one. It might be effective at making my medical care attainable in the long term, and who knows? Maybe this will be the breakthrough for the Universal Translator?
posted by neonrev at 7:18 PM on April 16, 2019 [17 favorites]


if these people can make it not a seriously odd or worse, douchey looking, thing to wear a hearing aid of any kind as a younger person

I’m surprised they don’t make hearing aids that look like Bluetooth earpieces. Although I suppose that could come under douchey looking.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:54 PM on April 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


So basically a better version of Google Translate with Pixel Buds, then?
posted by wierdo at 10:39 PM on April 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


They make a big thing about the language translation - but really, I think the wider appeal of hearing aids like this comes from their ability to let the wearer pick out a conversation in an otherwise poor signal to noise environment. The Livio hearing aid (and some others already on the market) can adapt to the acoustic qualities of particular spaces, to overall noise levels and to the direction the listener is facing with respect to a particular sound source.

The inability for people to be able to hear people at their table in a noisy restaurant or club can be an early signal of hearing loss - its is harder to do when you can't hear high frequencies. But there are some people - those with hidden hearing loss, for example - who pass normal audiometry tests yet fail to be able to do this. Finally, there are people with no physical hearing difficulties but who may not be great with regard to auditory selective attention - this is a pretty tricky skill and is one of the last things we learn to do as we develop: some people better than others.

So - in total - I think there are quite a few people who can hear OK in most environments but not well at all when it gets noisy. And we can add to this list, a set of people who simply want to do this a bit better than normal: to hear the fascinating sounding conversation at the next table, to be able to hear better after a drink or too or not enough sleep, to hear better when they are trying to pick out a second language, and so on . Taken together, that is a bigger market than is the case for language translation - I think.
posted by rongorongo at 11:10 PM on April 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


The expertise required to make a good piece of hardware (e.g. a hearing aid) seems to be almost completely separate to that required to make a good piece of software (e.g. translation tech). Doubly so for “AI”. Even Google, arguably world leaders in commercialising AI, has problems with making decent hardware, and vice verse for Apple.

So whenever I see what effectively amounts to press releases from companies that are trying to tie world-beating AI with good hardware, I think they are at best mistaken, or at worst, total bullshitters. Not that I wouldn’t like this to work, but I’ve seen too many of these press releases to know otherwise.
posted by adrianhon at 11:51 PM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


~~~ to be able to hear people at their table in a noisy restaurant or club
~~~ harder to do when you can't hear high frequencies

posted by rongorongo

Yeah, this is me.

Building houses is loud; commercial construction is -- literally -- deafening. (Though work as a sheet metal worker in residential settings isn't quiet, either, you're in the basement -- which as you'll recall is concrete -- in the basement banging on ductwork. We would literally chase other trades from the basement, because of the noise of banging on tin.)

And. Shows. The louder the better, right? Right. Except...

Also. Headphones. The loudest ones I could find, so. much. fun. to listen to Cobain wail as I'm pounding the trails on that mountain bike.

Seems it's cumulative.

I can't hear anything above a certain frequency -- ppl were down on mp3 files because the upper registers of the music was lost, it made no difference to me. But I don't care about that, it is what it is.

What I *do* care about is restaurants and clubs and shows.

Restaurants work if they're carpeted and not highly populated and/or during off-peak hours. Sitting across the table from you in a clattery restaurant, I literally cannot hear what you just said. So I don't go.

A friend and I were out, seated close together talking, but Whoops! here comes a bunch of other friends, festive etc. I stood, smiled nicely shook a few hands "Yeah, good to see you, too!" and left.

It's a matter of time, probably I'll end up domino-ing on it. Moores principle is in place, fortunately -- they're getting smaller and smaller while at the same time getting better and better.

Would it bother me if they looked like bluetooth earpieces? No. No, it would not.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:58 PM on April 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


Google's problem isn't building hardware, it's that they are the corporate personification of ADHD and refuses to see things through. Conversely, Apple's problem is that they have essentially become a sovereign wealth fund and have therefore become deeply conseervative, and thus unable to be bold any longer.

We're all worse for it because they and others like them have all the financial resources that could sustain projects like this that are hard but probably worth doing. Corporate social responsibility has recently become a catchphrase, but in reality the most responsible thing they could do short of liquidating the business and donating the full proceeds to charity is long term investment in human capital and R&D, which is something they will never do, unless forced by tax policy, since it upsets the investors.

Sorry for the tangent, I just get mad about not having nice things (thanks, rongorongo, for illustrating the utility) that are totally attainable since humans are collectively stupid no matter how intelligent we are individually.
posted by wierdo at 1:09 AM on April 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


my intolerance for siri misinterpreting me is high enough I don’t use it. I just can’t imagine throwing translation on top of that and the end result being any good.
posted by juv3nal at 1:51 AM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


We had a Japanese guy come and stay with us here, and he used google translate on his laptop in this way, and it was excruciatingly awful. And he spent so long messing with his setup that he lost a lot of direct contact with people, and the goodwill that this contact would have developed.

It is a technological fantasy to think that it will work as a universal translator. Accents, phrasing, loud noises - all of these things would throw the translation. Look at how good YouTube’s subtitles are, and expecting the same from some headphones is just… delusional sales pitch, perhaps. At best.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:56 AM on April 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


They say they want to make hearing aids cool, yet they’ve kept to a style of design that makes it as inconspicuous as possible.

I don’t think translation software is good enough. It’s like being able to very quickly look up the most likely meaning of each word and phrase. That can be a great start if you’ve then got time to do some clarifying work on a text, but in live situations even a few misunderstandings can send you off down wrong paths and make things worse rather than better, I’d have thought.

The optimism of thinking something stuck in your ear can monitor your physical and mental health is almost endearingly silly.

User: Livio, you keep feeding me wrong translations - what’s going on?
Livio: Well apparently you’re starting to get paranoid, lardbutt.

posted by Segundus at 3:00 AM on April 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


The inability for people to be able to hear people at their table in a noisy restaurant or club can be an early signal of hearing loss - its is harder to do when you can't hear high frequencies. But there are some people - those with hidden hearing loss, for example - who pass normal audiometry tests yet fail to be able to do this.

This has been me for about 10 years. And the thing is this is a problem that spirals out of control.

Old people stop going to trendy restaurants because of this. As a result, trendy restaurants get louder because everyone in them is young which makes them even worse for old people. Then everyone who lives in this world suffers accelerated hearing loss as merely going out for a dinner or drinks becomes the equivalent of going to a Who reunion concert or working at on airport runway. Everyone is now exposed to industrial levels of noise without any protection or workplace training about hearing loss. So they start bailing on the trendy restaurants even sooner and the crushing hearing loss loop tightens even more.
posted by srboisvert at 5:11 AM on April 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


They say they want to make hearing aids cool, yet they’ve kept to a style of design that makes it as inconspicuous as possible.

Exactly what jumped out at me when I read the article. That the hearing aid manufacturers insist on that stupid "discreet" design, where the microphones are facing backward and behind your ear, rather than something more functional, drives me every bit as crazy as my hearing problems do. That they reinforce the idea that bad hearing is something to be embarrassed about, rather than a disability, while making money from the people who they're shaming, is beyond infuriating.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 5:18 AM on April 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


FWIW the rate of progress with google translate is pretty astonishingly good. It's easy to forget where it was even 3 years ago.
posted by lazaruslong at 5:37 AM on April 17, 2019


in live situations even a few misunderstandings can send you off down wrong paths and make things worse rather than better, I’d have thought.

Ironically it’s easier if both sides in a face to face conversation are using translators (usually with typing) because everyone is aware of the difficulties. Still, it’s a great adjunct to pantomime, particularly for nouns.

Of course the fact that humans can convey so much with gestures and a few nouns is what makes machine translation so hard.

As a side note, large thumbs makes typing on my cell phone an error prone and therefore slow process. I am constantly getting my ass kicked by young shop clerks who are producing small speeches while I’m still getting my first sentence out.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:43 AM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


still_wears_a_hat - I've worn hearing aids my whole life - the Oticon Opn which I have now gets rid of the directional mic and it's honestly awesome, my experience hearing in the world is very different now than 15 years ago when I got my first digital hearing aids.

The "discreet" designs are definitely driven by the market - it's not the hearing aid manufacturers who are saying you should be embarrassed to wear them. It was excruciating trying to convince my grandparents they needed to wear hearing aids. Every audiologist I've seen will readily explain the tradeoff between size and power. I've always gone with behind the ear (versus in the ear) because I want full power. I'm wearing them to hear, right? The smaller hearing aids have gotten, the more comfortable they've gotten. I don't get cuts in/around my ears anymore. That's cool. Now that no one can tell I wear hearing aids, when I tell them, they say things like, "you're good at hiding them," or, "is that why you wear your hair like that? To hide them?" which is such a weeeeeirrrrd response. I wear my hair 'like that' because I'm a woman who wears her hair down, and I'm not hiding anything, you just didn't notice? But it's definitely not a stigma created by hearing aid manufacturers. Inexplicably, I get this the most from doctors during like, the medical history part of a conversation.

The Opn hearing aids have bluetooth integration which I use for phone calls. Makes phone calls more comfortable. Seems like this technology relies on bluetooth too, if you have to use the app to use it. Bluetooth kinda sucks, I avoid using it too much since it drains battery and the fidelity is, well, bluetooth. When hearing aids can do in the ear realtime translation they same way they do realtime sound processing to reduce background noise / boost frequencies of human speech, that will be genuinely awesome. This, as mentioned above, doesn't seem like that. Seems like the phone app does the work then streams to the hearing aids. In practice, probably fairly lossy and low-fidelity.
posted by ProtoStar at 6:54 AM on April 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


Hi - Machine Translation researcher/implementer/deployer here.

The translation capabilities of this are almost certainly a gimmick, and although the article doesn't say, I would bet my life it is simply a front-end to Google Translate. There have been dozens of scam kickstarters around this idea - using earbuds instead of hearing aides - this is the first I've seen from an actual company.

Interactive speech-to-speech translation CAN work, and CAN be accurate, but it relies on a few things: first, that the audio be clear, and second, that the translation task be bounded (for instance, buying a ticket). Neither of these are likely to be the case here.

It is *possible* that someone could have the translation enabled and have a rough gist of what is being said around them - but if that is the use case, it would be far far better to have the word salad appear on a screen rather than played out in synthesized English in the user's ear.
posted by scolbath at 7:31 AM on April 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


So the IEEE blogpost is EXTREMELY misleading. This paragraph:

The hearing aid can also translate between 27 languages. The language translation works in conjunction with a smartphone app. If an English speaker wearing the device says something to a Chinese speaker, the Livio AI system would translate the words and display them in Chinese characters on the English speaker’s smartphone screen. If the Chinese speaker said something in return, those words would be directly translated into spoken English in the ears of the hearing aid wearer.

Makes it sound like the hearing aid is involved at a minimum in the audio capture process. It is not - the hearing aid is only used for playback of the translated speech. All interaction occurs on the smartphone. This is at BEST a front end for Google Translate. You can see it in action here:

https://www.starkey.com/experience-livio-ai
posted by scolbath at 7:45 AM on April 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


My cousin's boyfriend showed me his smart hearing aid and the app he controls it with at a family birthday party this year. The capabilities are pretty awesome. He can set specific locations to always use certain settings for different kinds and levels of noise so they automatically adjust when the GPS recognizes the location. He also said he was able to get a translation of the Polish song Sto Lat that we always sing after Happy Birthday, which is pretty awesome. Or maybe he recorded it so he could translate later? They're also bluetooth enabled so he can listen directly to sound from his tv, computer, and cell phone.
posted by carrioncomfort at 8:37 AM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


don’t make hearing aids that look like Bluetooth earpieces

About a year ago, my father-in-law got a new hearing aid system. They ARE bluetooth, but look like traditional hearing aids (there is a little box that you carry that I believe handles the bluetooth portion of things).

He loves them, they work on their own for normal day-to-day life (yay, no more 90% TV volume), but they also connect to his phone and vehicle. I am sure he would love translation if he traveled.
posted by jkaczor at 8:40 AM on April 17, 2019


Graham Pullin's book Design Meets Disability looks critically at the design of hearing aids and assistive technologies in general. Some pull quotes here
posted by recklessbrother at 9:11 AM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Interactive speech-to-speech translation CAN work, and CAN be accurate, but it relies on a few things: first, that the audio be clear, and second, that the translation task be bounded (for instance, buying a ticket).

It would be neat if the translate function biased itself based on your physical location. You're in a supermarket? Okay. A Mexican restaurant? Okay. In the park having a philosophical debate about the merits of Goethe vs. Chang Tzu in Maori? Okay, unfortunately there you're on your own.

It would also be neat if it used GPS to automatically detect the location but if it got me reliable translation that would be useful enough that I would happily set location manually.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:15 AM on April 17, 2019


This is a little pepsi blue, and we need to be really careful about how much we buy into what the Big 6 manufacturers say about their hearing aids.

So yeah, these came out like almost a year ago. It doesn't work very well, to be honest.

Are its translations significantly better than Google Translate? 'Cause you can get some weird stuff out of Google Translate.

No, worse, with big time delay. It basically is Google translate but worse.

Apple’s Airpods are able to be used in an assistive listening mode

It's terrible though. The delay is enormous. Consumers and tech companies alike have been very slow to catch onto the idea that the primary reason hearing aids are expensive is that they process complex signals with huge amounts of amplification with less than a 10 ms delay (which is about all listeners can tolerate, due to visual integration) using a teeny tiny battery. It's an amazing engineering feat, and all the other features are kind of silly marketing ploys.

douchey looking, thing to wear a hearing aid of any kind as a younger person

I don't think hearing aids are douchey looking, and that's not very nice to all the people who do wear hearing aids. Hearing aid stigma has nothing to do with what the device looks like (you want a sweet looking spaceship thing in neon green? I can do that for you), and everything to do with a decades-old stigma about hearing loss as only a sign of aging and senility, hearing loss as an invisible disability until it gets so bad you have to treat it, society's strange fetishization of glasses but stigma around hearing aids etc etc. I.e. this is not a problem with the device, it's a deep problem steeped in ageism, ableism, etc.

I’m surprised they don’t make hearing aids that look like Bluetooth earpieces.

They do. They have. They will again. Also, can we not with the "douchey" language?

They say they want to make hearing aids cool, yet they’ve kept to a style of design that makes it as inconspicuous as possible.


This isn't true. You want a hearing aid that goes all the way in your ear canal so no one sees it? I can do that. You want a pink camo thing with a sparkle earmold that streams everything from your phone and you can tag with GPS and hooks up to your smart toaster? I can do that for you too.

Exactly what jumped out at me when I read the article. That the hearing aid manufacturers insist on that stupid "discreet" design, where the microphones are facing backward and behind your ear, rather than something more functional, drives me every bit as crazy as my hearing problems do.


Aggggghhhh. So frustrating when people spew this like they know what they're talking about. Your behind-the-ear hearing aid has two microphones. One sits atop the ear, the other just behind that. But they are omni-directional, and if you look at the polar plots, the pick up sound 360 degrees with some of head shadow. It's very clever because arranging the microphones this way allows them to use two input locations to change the polar plot and pick up sound from any azimuth in the environment depending on the signal. Want them to zoom in right in front of you like a flashlight on speech? Hey, they do that. Want to zoom behind you, they do that. Want them to zoom around and pick up speech wherever it's coming from, they can do that too. Having one on both ears now gives you 4 mics, so a 3rd order directional microphone, that can zoom around your entire head with laser focus. Hey, it's almost like engineers have devoted their lives to working on this problem and probably wouldn't design a speech processing device with backward facing mics!

Hearing aids have lots of problems, and a lot of the bells and whistles types of things - like the translate function on the Livio, like the ITTT channel on the Opn - are mostly marketing nonsense. But we also shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Hearing aids are amazing technological devices with decades of research behind them. Engineers have worked hand-in-hand with people with hearing loss for decades to design devices that work for them, to the extent possible. It would be great if we 1) didn't spread misinformation about them if you don't really know much about them; and 2) not call them things like "douchey" because this perpetuates really harmful stereotypes. Thanks.

Yours,
Audiologist, hearing scientist, studier of hearing aids.
posted by Lutoslawski at 9:53 AM on April 17, 2019 [24 favorites]


I use English to Spanish, which is reputed to be one of the easier combos — still results in confusion about 25% of the time.

That sounds... extremely impressive? 75% of the time it works is basically what you're saying, like, sure maybe the tech can only get better, but a device that translates speech into another language automatically is basically voodoo, even if it's a little confusing or wrong at times. When I talk to someone who isn't speaking English, I am confused 100% of the time because I cannot understand them at all. A device that got me 75% of the way to communicating is incredible any way you slice it. This is a device that defies a God's bitter tyranny over language and humanity.

I get that the tech isn't perfect, that it has a lot of progress to still make, if it's ever really possible given the complexities involved but hot damn, even a terrible TTS of google translate is still somewhat marvellous.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:27 AM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


No, no, no, no.

1. Real-time language translation IS.NOT.POSSIBLE. Just think about it for a moment: a paragraph spoken WITHOUT translation often needs to be entirely spoken before the listener fully understands the message. Now consider that different languages put the information in different places. You will ALWAYS need to have the translator hear the ENTIRE concept/message/etc before it can possibly convert the sentiment accurately to another language. This is not real-time.

2. It would be stunning if anyone came out of nowhere and bested Google at this point with translation... and Google is AWFUL at it.
posted by Cosine at 11:26 AM on April 17, 2019


Lutoslawski, I wish you were my audiologist, I'd like a sparkly thing that shows AND sounds good. And I'm sorry if I'm spewing without knowing as much as you do, but I can't understand how a mic behind my ear can be as good as one facing forward. Isn't my ear absorbing some of the sound? People who don't hear well are always cupping their ears forward; I do it when I'm not wearing my hearing aids, and it helps.

Maybe it's time for me to get new hearing aids; it's been 3 years or so, but I tried several, from several different places, and none of them zoomed around very well. I'd be thrilled to find some that do.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 12:23 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


One of the most frustrating things I've experienced with regard to wearing hearings aids (which I've done since the age of four) is that they keep getting more expensive. The tech has definitely improved over the past 30+ years I've been wearing them so I won't complain about that but certain aspects of the newer, "cooler," ways to interact with them bug the hell out of me. Yeah, it's cool what I can do with my phone to change the volume and other settings, but there's no fucking "off" switch on the aid itself and so I always have to either use my phone which switches BOTH aids off, or open up the battery case a little which risks losing the battery itself. Not usually a problem except that I have to replace the batteries every 4 days and am usually in public. What happens when you take your hearing aid out while it's on? FEEDBACK. So trying to discretely change a battery in one aid results in me trying to partly open the battery case while the hearing aid is in, pull out the aid, replace the battery, and either close the case partway before putting in ear and closing completely (and I've lost batteries trying to do that) or just close all the way and quicklky put hearing aid in ear while the high pitch feedback rings around the room.

HEARING AID MANUFACTURERS PLEASE BRING BACK THE FUCKING OFF SWITCH LIKE YOU HAD FOR THE OLD ANALOG MODELS YOU BASTARDS

/rant over
posted by acidnova at 12:32 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


I'm sorry if I'm spewing without knowing as much as you do, but I can't understand how a mic behind my ear can be as good as one facing forward. Isn't my ear absorbing some of the sound? People who don't hear well are always cupping their ears forward; I do it when I'm not wearing my hearing aids, and it helps.

For any behind-the-ear hearing aid, there are two microphones and two microphone ports. They are close to each other, near the top of the hearing aid. The tubing length is chosen or cut such that the front mic perches just on top of the pinna, and is not blocked at all by the ear. The second mic is a few millimeters lower, and is more behind the actual ear. Directionality is created by timing and phase differences between signals reaching these two ports.

The front mic should not at all be blocked by the ear. The back one might be, but its purpose is to attenuate sound behind you, so it doesn't matter. The other thing is that the mic being behind the ear creates a pretty negligible effect as far as a shadow in the polar plot. Most frequencies are long enough that the easily pass around it with no level changes. Maybe at really really high frequencies there could be an effect.

The ear cupping thing totally works! You get about a 5 dB increase in high frequencies by doing this. But it's not about making the ears face more forward. By cupping you increase resonance for high frequencies, e.g. for frequencies smaller than about the shape of that bowl you make, you're going to increase how much they bounce around in there, which has an additive effect, and makes them louder. You're basically putting the same input sound pressure level into a smaller cavity, which increase the level that makes it into your ear canal.

Sorry I was a little flippant in my first response. I spend a lot of my life trying to correct people's ideas about hearing aids, because there is so much misinformation. There's a lot wrong with hearing aids and hearing aid marketing and all the rest. But there's a lot right, too.
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:45 PM on April 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


HEARING AID MANUFACTURERS PLEASE BRING BACK THE FUCKING OFF SWITCH LIKE YOU HAD FOR THE OLD ANALOG MODELS YOU BASTARDS

Ha, I don't disagree with you at all. It's not the same, but most can be programmed to have at least a mute function with a long press of the volume or program button (not technically off, but won't squeal when you take them off).
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:47 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


still_wears_a_hat

I have behind-the-ear aids, but there is a microphone placed right at the front where the main aid attaches to the tube/wire leading to the earmold. And as Lutosławski said, the microphones are omnidirectional.
posted by acidnova at 12:47 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


but most can be programmed to have at least a mute function with a long press of the volume or program button

Doing that still mutes both aids simultaneously so I don't get to have hearing in either ear while changing the battery. Difficult if I'm in the middle of a conversation or listening to a lecture :(
posted by acidnova at 12:49 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


still_wears_a_hat, on some devices, the "rear one" is much easier to see, so it does sometimes look like there is only one microphone and that is backward facing! So it's not a completely insane thought. I usually try to point out where the microphones are during a fitting, but it's not the focus of the appointment and easy for the patient to miss/forget even if it is explained to them.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:04 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


All this, and my hovercraft is till full of eels.
posted by DreamerFi at 1:08 PM on April 17, 2019


75% of the time it works is basically what you're saying, like, sure maybe the tech can only get better, but a device that translates speech into another language automatically is basically voodoo, even if it's a little confusing or wrong at times.

It is very impressive, no doubt. It is definitely a step up from carrying a translation dictionary around.

When I talk to someone who isn't speaking English, I am confused 100% of the time because I cannot understand them at all.

I think you'll find that it's considerably less than 100% if you're there in person. Conversation in a store on a dock in Greece:

Me: Kalimera! ("Good morning", thus exhausting my knowledge of Greek)
Clerk: Kalimera!
Me: [taps self on chest] [makes up and down wave motion with hand] [pretends to stick finger down throat, throw up]
Clerk: [Hands over Dramamine]

Truthfully I'm starting to miss pantomime the same way I miss dead reckoning. Smart phones have ruined everything.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:25 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


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