I presumed that you have reviewed the product matrix to understand the differences between the 4 Oticon Intent tier levels? If not, below is that information.
The most obvious one that jumps out is that the Intent 3 and 4 don’t have the 4D Sensor in them. Other than that, the most obvious and I think tangential difference between the Intent 1 and 2 is the 2 dB difference in maximum neural noise suppression. So it depends on whether you feel that you get enough help with the noise reduction in complex environments to help you understand speech better or not. If you’re satisfied with this already on the Intent 2, then going to the Intent 1 will not give you much improvement. On the other hand, if your HCP already set your max Neural Noise Suppression to 10 dB on the Intent 2 and you still don’t feel like you’re getting enough speech understanding yet, then the Intent 1 may help improve that.
Another way to look at it is that if you don’t find yourself in very noisy places often enough where you need to understand speech, then the Intent 2 may suffice for your case. Also, if you pay for the Intent 1 premium but then your HCP only sets the max Neural Noise Suppression value on your Intent 1 to 10 dB instead of the possible 12 dB, then it’s almost as if your Intent 1 is dumbed down to the Intent 2 level. It’s really not that straightforward since there are other parameters beside the Neural Noise Suppression that are dumbed down a little bit in the Intent 2. But I think the max Neural Noise Suppression is the key one.
Keep in mind that the Real 1 only has 10 dB max Neural Noise Reduction. So the Intent 2 already matches the Real 1 in this respect.
