I wonder how credible is their technology based on a test with 20 people?
From signia’s witepaper:
Twenty participants (10 female, 10 male, age range: 55-82 years, mean age: 72 years) with sensorineural sloping hearing loss participated in the study. The mean audiogram of the participants is shown in Figure 3. They were all experienced hearing aid wearers.
Yes, I had the same problem with Phonak Lumity at a party. Parties are really challenging situations.
I trialed the Signia AX for 6 weeks and they were great for me in all situations. I returned them in anticipation of this new IX platform bu5 haven’t gotten them yet. Based on what you’re saying, I wonder if I should go back to the AX? Is there any way to turn off the multi-focus and opt for just a single sound stream?
Well try it, maybe I should have had more patience but the sound of Signia (and also Phonak) was not for me (to sharp and to exploading).
And yes for shure you can set the fokus range on the app (180°,90°,45° i think) that’s helped a little but when you are on a large table then it will not help a lot when people were out of the range and asked a question
According to the chart, it just shows the SNR contrast between speech and noise in general. There’s no indication from Oticon that there would be any actual differentiation between the directions of where the speeches are coming from like you think there is per your question above.
Given this lack of indication from Oticon in their whitepaper, I would venture to say that if there is speech present, and there is motion to signal intention to listen to speech intently, like the head moving forward in the X direction for straining to hear speech, or the head turning left and/or right to signal searching for speech), then the speech signal, regardless of where it comes from, will be given higher SNR contrast against noise.
If there are multiple speeches going on in various different directions, then all speech signals coming from any direction are given the same higher SNR contrast per the guessed intention. So in the scenario you mentioned, it would not give SNR contrast priority to a speech coming in front more than the SNR contrast to a speech coming from the side. I would say that the intent is simply interpreted as straining to hear for speech, not straining to hear the speech coming from where, so the SNR contrast priority is given to all speeches present at that SAME moment.
I might add that in the old days with the OPN and OPN S, before the DNN was introduced, SNR contrast for speech in the front was done by creating a noise model of sounds on the sides and the back, then subtracting this noise model from the front speech (a la headphone noise cancelling approach) to remove the diffused noise that’s embedded to the front speech.
By the way, in the more traditional beam forming frontal approach of other brands’ aids, this diffused noise embedded to the front speech does not get removed, only the side and rear noise gets removed.
Anyway, back to the topic again, the Oticon OPN has a voice detector and if a voice is detected that is on the sides or the rear and not in front, the whole MVDR beam forming gets cancelled, along with the noise model subtraction for front speech clean up, JUST to enable the user to be able to hear the non-front speech as well. But even now that none of the speeches (either in front or rear or side) can be rid of their embedded diffused noise, at least the speeches anywhere are now audible, albeit not in their cleanest form with the best SNR contrast against noise.
But now moving forward to the More and Real with the DNN 1.0 and now the Intent with the DNN 2.0, the DNN can recreate all discrete sound components in a sound scenes and be able to rebalance them much more easily, it’d just be easier to give priority SNR contrast to all speeches if they’re present (regardless of whether they’re going on at the same time or not). So why bother trying to figure out the intent to boost speech in one direction but not in other directions? After all, all speeches are important and I don’t think the guessing of intent game has gotten that accurate to be confident enough to give one speech priority over another. That wouldn’t be called intent guessing (based on head movement) anymore, it’d probably be called mind reading by then. 
We bought my wife’s Oticon OPNS1 hearing aids in Canada 4 years ago. We moved to a warmer country to retire. 3 years later we returned to Canada and asked her audiologist for a set of replacement rechargeable batteries. But we forgot to bring the OPNS1 with us. The audiologist would not sell us the batteries. Our mistake for forgetting the hearing aids perhaps. But the hearing aids were also outside of warranty so their patronizing refusal seemed to us a bit archaic to say the least.
A few months later and we are now in the UK for 2 weeks for a funeral. We phoned the Oticon HQ in Hamilton, UK for batteries, and explained our situation. Regardless, they would not sell them to us, even though we informed them that there was no Oticon representation in our new retirement home country. We then asked for the spec of the rechargeable battery so we could look for it on Amazon. They would not provide it. They told us to contact a reseller near London. We contacted 3 resellers and each one refused to sell us the batteries. They also refused to allow us to visit their premises and have them install the batteries. One of them said if we resided in the UK they would take us as a new / transfer customer but would charge us GBP 350 for another hearing test plus 50 pounds for the new rechargeable batteries. The hearing aids cost over CAD 5,000 (USD 3,850) but it looks like we are forced to either buy another set or return to Canada.
We share our experience to show how inflexible the Oticon company and its resellers are to accommodate retirees who experience hearing aid problems when they travel away from home.
Thank you for sharing your battery experience with Oticon and sorry to hear how difficult Oticon and their HCPs are being difficult about it with you. That’s definitely a negative mark on Oticon and their vendors.
You may want to check out this thread below from this forum that discusses trying to find and buy the batteries yourself on eBay if you want. Removing the door to replace the battery can be done by yourself with a simple pointy tool and there’s instruction on YouTube on how to do that. But there’s a step to reset the batteries’ statistics that would have to be done by your HCP in the software, unless you’re a DIY who can do it yourself. If you’re stuck without a new working battery, it’s still better to change to new batteries and forgo the statistic reset so you can get the aids working again until next time you can see your HCP in Canada.
Heh. They mean “bothersome”.
Thank you for sharing your experience. It’s unfortunate that some hearing aid companies can be so cruel and unsympathetic, especially considering that they provide products meant to enhance the quality of life for their customers. I had a similar experience with Phonak when I moved from Canada to my current country. I was refused service, so I ended up buying a new pair of Oticon OPN.
Oh, so there’s been a sharp advance over the Real’s Companion iOS app which, the majority of the times it’s opened, has no connection to one or both aids?
Given what Oticon says
I find your interpretation to be strained and not very credible. Nor does it sound desirable in real-life situations. And I don’t understand how a system such as you described would benefit from a motion sensor at all. Besides, there are constraints on steering of directionality, and arbitrarily-located speech sources can’t always be emphasized equally. But I’ll certainly concede that you’re entitled to your interpretation.
Meanwhile, as noted above by @AbramBaileyAuD, the Demant CEO said in the 4Q 2023 earnings call about the Intent:
So all in all, a very strong new platform. It comes out, as I said, across all brands, including Philips and Bernafon.
I wonder, in view of what you’ve been saying about differences in the “core” tech between Oticon and Philips, what you think “It” might refer to in the CEO’s statement. “It” likely refers to “platform,” but that could have any of several possible meanings.
Thanks for the advice, Misterref.
I think this is a great question. I would be curious to find out myself. As for my guess, the new platform (Sirius) probably allows the implementation of the accelerometer that does at least part of the 4D sensors (the XYZ dimension accelerometer), and this will probably carry over to the Philips and Bernafon if their new versions get put on the same platform as well.
As for their core technologies, I would guess that they can and would remain different. Oticon has its DNN 2.0 on this new platform, so there’s no reason why Philips and Bernafon cannot have an AI machine learning 2.0 on this same new Sirius platform as well. Because the old Polaris/Polaris S platforms can be shared between Oticon More/Real and the Philips 9030/9040 and Bernafon whatever with different cores on them, there’s no reason to conclude that on the new Sirius platform here that things would be any different, meaning that they must now share the same core which is the DNN 2.0 and cannot put different cores on this new same platform.
Of course you’re definitely entitled to your doubts as well, whatever they may be. I only expressed my interpretation because you specifically pressed me for it. But frankly it really doesn’t matter to me if you find my opinion/interpretation credible or not. I don’t need to convince anybody anything in the first place. I’m just sharing my thinking here.
Just to recap, my opinion here is that the guessed intention is not good enough to really know with sufficient accuracy which speech from a certain direction the user really intends to hear from for sure just based on the head movement. To clarify, the aids can probably figure out where the speeches come from, but guessing the intent of which speech the user intends to focus on is what is not accurate enough, just based on the accelerometer information. So if the guessed intention of which speech the user wants to focus on is not good enough, why would Oticon want try to assign priority on the SNR contrast of one speech over another speech coming from a different direction (like you purported Oticon to be doing in your previous question to me)? That would be an oxymoron, especially when you yourself and a lot of people here seem to express a lot of doubt about the accuracy of Oticon’s intention guessing in the first place.
So although you think that Oticon cannot accurately guess your intention of wanting to focus on the speech to the side of the car, but instead Oticon might wrongly boost the speech in the front for you which you don’t want to focus on, why would you still want to believe that Oticon would attempt to try to give priority to speech from one direction over another speech from another direction based on a bad guess that you think it might make? Just so that you can poke holes into their intention guessing accuracy in order to be able to point out the bad results they may cause?
Well that’s what the users have to test now.
I hope that it will work like this: I am talking in a noisy restaurant to my wife sitting opposite of me, everything is hearable but the voice fo my wife is more specific, no penetrant conversation from behind or from the side that is overlay the voice fo my wife.
Now the waiter is comming: Hi there, (I reconigze that someone is speaking to me, but this voice is not that clearly like those of my wife and what are you doing if someone is speaking to you? you move the head to this person, eye contact) How can I serve you? (this now is cleary and you completely understand what he is talking)
There are other hearing aids that ocasionally bring some speech depending on the volume of someones speech and this is annoying for me, because I don’t want that a conversation from the table next to me is sometimes jumping in my ear.
So, Misterref, how does it work in the restaurant now with the current technology?
Hearing aids with rechargeable batteries…we really are at the mercy of the supplier, and I think that their procedures may vary depending on the company we are in.
I have phonaks with rechargeable batteries. As long as they are working I’m ok. I’m Canadian too. Here’s hoping that the manufacturers procedures are changed to accommodate the hearing aid user.
I think that several HA mfgs now give people both options on the same model, to pick either the rechargeable kind or the disposable battery kind. But I’m aware that some model (like the Phonak Lumity) only comes with the rechargeable version only. I think at this point, if a user feels very strongly about not being dependent on the HA mfg to provide proper support for the rechargeable battery version, they should vote with their wallet and find a brand/model that supports both options so they can pick the disposable option.
What do you mean? I am testing atm Starkey Genesis and they are very good. Maybe the one I would buy, but I don’t like the metalic sound, so I have atm also the Resound Nexia for cross-check, because the Nexia wasn’t that good in the restaurant even as I understood everything.
Hopefully I can test soon the Intent as for myself the Real was good but had some disavantage (recharable has not the length I want and the battery are to small 312), the Intent will hopefully soon have the 13 battery, atm there is only the recharable modell
What I mean is that restaurant situations are difficult with current technology. You are speculating that that hearing in noisy environments will be worse with Oticon’s new technology.
Why would it be worse? Why would Oticon or any company make a new generation of product that is worse than the previous generation? That doesn’t make sense to me. Their white paper reports improved results.