I like to try to keep things on a positive note here but I just read through some of the advertising copy for one of the new ‘AI enhanced’ hearing aids by one of the major manufacturers and, based on previous disappointments, I couldn’t help feeling there probably wasn’t a big gap between their exaggerated claims and outright lies.
Advertising hearing aids offers a huge temptation because the claims are not falsifiable. The field is open and the rewards are enormous. Improvements in real world performance over the last 10 years has been incremental, but each year we are subjected to the assertion that there have been major technological breakthroughs. A couple of years ago I had the experience of trialling the offerings of all the major manufacturers and with my ‘ski slope’ loss I couldn’t tell the difference between them.