Not really. But I guess you guys have no clue how the DNN works so I’m not sure if I’d bother arguing with you here about it. The whole point of training the DNN to almost perfection up front is so that you don’t need as much resources to achieve good result during execution.
I’ll give another analogy. A tennis player, he spends years to train his DNN to ingrain into his brain on how to make the perfect execution when he plays. When he goes to play on a tournament, you see him make amazing, unbelievable shots EFFORTLESSLY. He does NOT need to invest more RESOURCE to execute those perfect shots. He does it effortlessly because his DNN is already trained to do it gracefully and beautifully with minimal effort and minimal resource.
I still don’t think you’re right about this. And to use your analogy, as I and others have noted, the Oticon platform does not, in sound terms, make “amazing, unbelievable shots EFFORTLESSLY.”
But regardless (and it’s anecdotal), some people find the Whisper implementation to be more effective. The Oticon sound is natural, to be sure. But in terms of making speech intelligible in a noisy background, it leaves a lot to be desired (IMHO).
By the way, what makes you the expert on how DNNs work? Do you have a degree in computer science, particularly in AI?
Actually there was such a case recently and I answered all 1, 2, and 3. Below is the link to that thread. And if you look at post #2 in which I replied to the OP, at the end, I mentioned that the Philips HearLink 9030 and the Whisper are other options to try if the OP wishes to.
Neville suggested getting the Phonak Paradise with the Roger option after the OP shared that the More wasn’t helpful for him. I replied that it was probably the best suggestion after learning that the OP has asymmetrical hearing loss, and that’s probably why the More doesn’t work out as well for him.
I think you (@x475aws) chimed in to recommend the Whisper, but the OP balked at not wanting to deal with a brain.
So I’m not above doing either of the 3 options you mentioned above. While I have my own opinion about Whisper and I’m critical of some of the choices it makes (going with the brain and the subscription model), I’m perfectly OK with telling people about the Whisper option in case they want to try it.
Did I say that I’m an expert on DNN? You said that I have a flaw in my reasoning about DNN. Then I said back that you don’t know DNN the way I understand it. So tit for tat. That doesn’t make me an expert on DNN any more or less than it makes you an expert in DNN. We just agree to disagree.
When someone makes an analogy, you don’t take the literal saying in that analogy and apply it back to the original case. Of course the More doesn’t make any “shots”, regardless of whether it’s amazing or unbelievable or effortlessly.
And no, I don’t have a degree in computer science, particularly in AI. I only have an MS degree in Electrical Engineering. But one doesn’t need to have a degree in computer science and particularly in AI to talk about DNN in layman’s term, does one?
Thank you for posting this. It’s a beautiful analogy, but incomplete, and it tells me where your understanding of machine learning in hearing aids goes wrong. I look forward to explaining why it’s wrong, though I may end up using more tortured analogies while doing so. But I want to leave this alone for a while, so @ziploc isn’t drowned out in his own thread.
There was a thread (link below, at the end of post #40 from Neville) where the OP was making comments that the More has a more natural sound than the Phonak P90, and a debate ensued, with some argument that with the right HCP who knows what they’re doing, the HCP should be able to make adjustment to the HA to make it sound like another HA of another brand/model. Neville (one of our 2 frequent HCPs on this form who are very respected) said that give him a quiet hour, and he bets that he can make the More sound like the Phonak Pico Forte, but just the basic sound, not counting things like the automatic features or performance in noise.
So maybe there’s hope that your Whisper HCP can try to tune the Whisper to sound more like the More for you, if that’s what you want. There’s nothing to lose but to ask the Whisper HCP to try for you. But I had a debate with Neville about whether you want to keep copying the sound quality of another HA brand and model forever or not? It just doesn’t seem sustainable if it has to take a quiet hour each time there’s a major update that erases the previous work and requires the matching to be redone.
I agree with this. I admire @ziploc for his tolerance in allowing non-performance discussions to go on in his thread. Meanwhile, he steadfastly stays on-course and continues to share his experience with a lot of objectivity.
D_wooluf created another thread to discuss non-performance Whisper issues, so you can take this discussion there to continue further if you wish. But personally I see it as a futile exercise because analogies are just that. They’ll never be perfect and anyone can find holes to poke through them if they want to. They should be viewed in the general sense, so if you still don’t buy it, that’s OK and it’s OK to agree to disagree.
No matter how much you and I disagree, the fact is that Oticon did do a DNN and were able to implement it on silicon small enough to fit onto the HA, whether it takes more resources to execute or not like you seem to think it should. I’m sure they didn’t lie when they said they implemented a DNN and put it on the HA. Whisper and Oticon just do it differently, let’s just agree on that. Whether one way is better than the other or not, in the end, users will be the judge of it.
I think it all started because you asked me if I have an ethical obligation to disseminate the information in the Whisper whitepaper that “nobody but them right now can run a deep learning algorithm of their size and capability” or not? Maybe instead of a long and contentious answer, I should have simply said “No, because I don’t buy into it. But of course you can freely disseminate the information if you buy into it. I just don’t have any ethical obligation to do so because it’s not ethical to disseminate something I don’t believe in in the first place.”
And I’ve already answered the second question on whether I have an ethical obligation as an influencer to try Whisper myself. My answer is I’m game if Whisper approaches me for a complete no-string attached trial for my honest opinion. But I’m not going to seek out an HCP to initiate a trial myself if I don’t have any honest intention of using it even if I find its SIN superior to my OPN 1, simply because they have those 3 deal breakers in my book, and I don’t even struggle with SIN like you guys do in the first place. So it’s not fair to the HCP for me to play that game. And it’s also not fair to me to have to spend time to find a Whisper HCP who may or may not charge me a fitting fee.
Apologies if this has been dealt with and I missed it (lots of verbiage to skim through), but @ziploc’s boxy sound is very fixable is it not? The audi has all the levers they need.
I support @Volusiano’s responses here. His thoughts tends to be the most logically sound ones and he also admits faults when others point them out. I have a degree in AI and this analogy is elegant, although it does not capture AI performance nuances such as precision recall and other metrics when the hearing aids companies do not publicize them.
All in all, I am supportive of Whisper and hope they do well to collectively boost AI innovation in this space, which is inherently based on silicon and battery consumption tradeoffs. I would not mind making an iPhone a brain if possible perhaps in the long term.
Now I don’t claim to be an HCP or audiology expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt or whatever you believe in. I only say it based on my layman’s knowledge gained as a user and what I read on this forum and on audiology papers.
The sound signature of a brand is most likely shaped through its proprietary fitting rationale. If one wants to shape the Whisper sound to sound like the Oticon sound, I assume that the HCP would probably need the Oticon Genie 2 software, and he/she would need to run the patient’s audiogram through Genie 2 to see what the prescribed gain target curve looks like. Then when he/she does REM on Whisper for the patient, instead of following the Whisper gain curve target, he/she should make the REM adjustment to the Oticon gain curve target instead. I think that would achieve the goal of acquiring the Oticon sound signature.
Now @Neville was saying that give him a quiet hour or so, he can copy the sound of one HA brand/model to another brand/model. That sounds more complicated than just mimicking the target curve of the desired sound signature. So I don’t really know beyond my educated guess above. He’s copied here so he can chime in.
Do note, however, that whenever there’s a need to re-prescribe, whether it be due to a change in dome fitting, or change in audiogram, or perhaps an in-situ audiometry run, then the duplication process needs to be redone again, both on the Genie 2 side to generate a newly prescribed target curve, then on the Whisper side to adjust the REM results toward the Oticon target curve instead of the Whisper target curve.
So in theory I think it can be done. How practical it is depends on how often it needs to be done due to updates and changes and whether re-prescriptions need to be performed upon updates and changes or not. It may also not be perfect if the fitting dome on the Oticon side may not be exactly the same compared to the fitting dome on the Whisper side, so any adjustment on the Oticon prescription for the new fitting may not fit perfectly with the fitting on the Whisper side, unless you use the Oticon domes on the Whisper ear pieces.
Ok. My view might be simplistic. I was thinking @ziploc needs more of the high frequencies, so just give him more of the high frequencies. Maybe the fitter was being very conservative in that respect, possibly treating him more as a new user? I don’t know what tools they have to work with. I wasn’t thinking of making it sound like anything else, actually. Just give him more highs.
Not so fast. You do claim some authority, by saying things like “I guess you guys have no clue how the DNN works,” which is actually quite different from stating “you don’t know DNN the way I understand it.”
When you make statements like, “The whole point of training the DNN to almost perfection up front is so that you don’t need as much resources to achieve good result during execution,” you’re also claiming authority beyond what could be qualified as “layman’s.”
However, I agree that there definitely is an aspect to the Whisper that smacks of testing – and that’s normal for a completely new, just-released hearing aid like this. I think that soliciting customer feedback, regardless of whether you judge the product to be immature or not, is a good thing – by comparison, Oticon only deals with audiologists. The Whisper is certainly not for everyone, but I wouldn’t make the judgment that it was released “prematurely” – that’s just the nature of software/hardware development which, especially in the initial stages, will never be close to perfect.
FWIW, I think that you get irritated or angry reactions to your posts about the Whisper because, as pointed out earlier, there is a generally dismissive, skeptical tone that you adopt vis-à-vis the product that is annoying because you have no personal experience with it.
However, I’m happy to agree to disagree about Whisper’s merits.
Not much more complicated. If ear canal coupling acoustics are nearly identical, it’s easier to do it in the testbox. You just run the first set of hearing aids, and then adjust the gain and compression and max output on the second set of hearing aids to match exactly. You need an REM system that will run multiple versions of the same stimuli or, better, one that saves comparison curves. If the coupling is significantly different, you need to do it on-ear which is annoying because the patient needs to sit still and quiet for a while.
But no, you don’t typically need to do it again later. When you update the audiogram it doesn’t re-set everything. Similarly, if you make a new manual program you just duplicate the base program that is set up and go from there. I said a quiet hour to make a More sound like a pico forte, but a pico forte is an ancient analogue BTE–going from one modern aid to another modern aid is faster. (I was probably over-estimating with an hour anyway.)
In the original Whisper thread, when nobody had trialed it yet, and where anything goes, yeah sure, I spoke my piece about what I think and was dismissive of the key ideas of Whisper (the brain, the subscription model, the pricing, the no DIY).
But in this thread, I challenge you to find anything I said that’s being dismissive of Whisper, NOT UP UNTIL THE POINT when @x475aws asked me whether I felt an ethical obligation to disseminate the information from Whisper’s whitepaper about it being able to process the size and capability of the deep learning algorithm like nobody else can. Of course I don’t, and I listed out the reasons why, it being that I dismiss its claimed approach as the ONLY legitimate approach that everybody has to measure up to.
So the door was opened by @x475aws inviting me in to enlighten me on the “new” information, and wanting me to accept it and asking if I don’t feel an ethical obligation to disseminate this “new” information as an influencer. That’s only when I objected and became dismissive, meaning I spoke my mind, again. I really don’t want to beat this horse to death again, but it kept on being resurrected and waved in front of me, wanting me to submit to it.
And the questions asked did not relate to, nor require that I need to have any personal experience with it to form my own opinion. It never asked for my opinion BASED ON my personal experience with Whisper. It only asked for my opinion BASED ON the “new” information presented.
Just for reference, below is the quote on the question from @x475aws posed to me in post #94 on this thread that opened the door to my (dismissive) response.
You just need to quit defending yourself. There are, always have been, and always will be it seems, those whose self esteem seems to be wrapped up in, and insisting on the universal application of the choices they make. You can’t change them and there’s a point where simply ignoring them is best. I’ve found the things you’ve said to be helpful and anyone who can read without prejudice will benefit from your input whether or not the product you prefer works for them or not. You’re not the one who looks ridiculous. In the words of Mark Twain, never argue too long with fool for those looking on might not be able to tell which is which.
No, that’s not it. It’s that Whisper is a true breakthrough, from my experience and that of a few others here, and I want it to survive. The hostility to Whisper, among some well-spoken people here, is certainly not helping its chances. If it survives, its work will eventually benefit all of us, because all the manufacturers will have to offer something like it. It might become the top tier of aids, and push down the price of what is now the top tier. Whisper has hearing industry business people who are certainly aiming for insurance and VA coverage. But if it doesn’t get traction, and the venture capitalists pull the plug, then I’m afraid we won’t see this kind of speech-in-noise performance (along with the most open-ness) again for a long time, for any amount of money.
I may have misidentified the motivation but the result is the same. Not every question, not every disagreement, not every doubt is illegitimate and if a product is worth its claims it will survive. You’re just a bit too gung ho and quite out of line in suggesting that Volusiano has a responsibility to support your (as yet unproven) claims of Whisper superiority. I’ve read the testimonies here and the best ones don’t include your “this is the greatest ever” assertions. Maybe it is and time and performance will tell, not the anecdotal experiences of a few here on this forum.
Additionally I don’t see any hostility on the part of Volusiano. His hesitancy/refusal to jump on the Whisper bandwagon based on what is yet limited evidence is hardly hostile. When I explained that the More 1 was not working well for me he suggested that I might want to check out the Whisper as some here were experiencing some very positive benefits. That can hardly be called hostility. The best thing you can do is show how its positive benefits have worked for you and leave it at that. There are so many variables at work in individual hearing issues that there is most likely never going to be a one size fits all solution.
Taking it from there, say our tennis player shows up with his leg in a cast. Even with his trained neural network, he isn’t likely to win that day unless it’s a really friendly match. Or he shows up with a visual handicap of some sort, missing super high diopter contacts or retinal detachment or whatever. He isn’t going to play up to his usual standards. Or he’s short of breath because of asthma or cardiovascular issues. He won’t be able to keep up.
Yes, our tennis player knows how to play tennis, after many hours of practice and many games. But he still needs bodily resources (sensory, musculoskeletal, respiratory, circulation) to get around the court and deal with the ball in every moment of every game.
Should I try to make the jump back to DNN’s and hearing aids, to finish explaining why processor speed matters even when there’s a trained DNN?
