With apologies to efigalaxie and anyone else concerned about the potential negative effect of OTC on the quality of HA’s and the enjoyment of great professional treatment, maybe if MFA from Google and OTC together ever really get rolling, there will be great Multi-Mic/Roger Select-like devices available at a much lower cost.
When Amazon can make and “give away” Echo Dot as low as $30 on sale - and these have excellent 7-microphone far-field arrays that can pick my voice out of a very noisy environment with the AC, the refrigerator, the Jenn Aire stove top exhaust, etc., all running, there is hope that if the market expands due to OTC bringing a higher volume of hearing device purchases that the cost of remote microphone devices will come down a bit.
Besides my previous remarks of how the cost of personal computing has dropped since the pioneer days with orders of magnitude increases in CPU speed, RAM, and disk storage, I remember the reel tape recorder my Dad had back in the 1950’s.
Dad’s tape recorder was about a foot square and 6 to 8 inches high. Cost him $800 in the '50’s, which would be equivalent to $7,000 to $8,000 in today’s U.S. dollars. Forgotten when it was but just before solid-state devices (the iPod, etc.) came along, you could buy a cassette recorder for $30 or $40, if my foggy recollection is right.
So hopefully, a similar microelectronics cost revolution will come to remote mics that work with HA’s. Except for proprietary transmission protocols, there shouldn’t be anything terribly special in the remote microphones that’s not already being employed by folks like Amazon in their much less expensive ambient AI devices (which can be battery-powered, too, - you can buy an attachment on Amazon that will convert your Dot into a portable device that doesn’t require AC and will run for hours).
Bonus wild idea here: One really cool thing about AI assistants is their ability to identify who’s talking. It would be great if someday that technology could migrate to HA’s and you could tell your HA’s or remote mic, “listen to Jenna” and in a restaurant conversation with a bunch of people yakking away around a table, your device would know what Jenna sounds like and use the microphone array to tune in on what Jenna is saying and drop other conversations more out of your hearing. So it’s an interesting idea that the ambient computing AI revolution might actually be a driver in development in HA’s. Devices that are too small for a screen or a keyboard, you can still talk to, either directly or through Alexa, Google Home, or …. So all the billions and billions of dollars to tech research and production going on with ambient AI for picking up and understanding speech, including in noisy environments, may have considerable HA spinoff. Maybe Amazon’s FIRE HA is just around the corner?! <<<just kidding!>>> (my joke is on the Amazon Fire Phone).
