My car is a 2013, so relatively old, but it has Bluetooth and works fine with my fairly new android cell phone. Then I got Oticon Real.
Now I can drive my car and place phone calls normally. The car Bluetooth connects to the cell phone and the car speakers and microphones handle audio.
When I try to receive a call in the car, however, the car Bluetooth gets confused. It rings and tells me that there is a call, and when I press the answer button, the phone answers and audio goes through the cell phone itself, not the car speaker (it should) and not the Oticon aid (never should).
Repeat with my Oticon aids switched off: I can receive calls normally and the car Bluetooth handles the audio. So it appears that the Oticon Bluetooth is confounding the car Bluetooth, but only for incoming calls.
Do you think this is fixable? Is this something that my audiologist can address? Or is this a fault of the older car?
I’m experiencing the same issue with the Philips 9040s, which I acquired recently. I believe the 9040s are very similar, if not identical, to the Oticon Reals. I had Phonaks before (actually K-9s), which didn’t have this issue. So, I’m fairly certain it’s an Oticon issue, although I don’t know of a work-around. Hopefully someone else can help!
I’d go with that as well, but Oticon have been getting a “real” workout from so many on this forum regarding Bluetooth connectivity, the ConnectClip is the main culprit it seems.
The Oticon Real has ASHA support (Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids which uses Bluetooth Low Energy), so if your Android phone is newer and has ASHA support as well, then the Real can connect to your Android phone directly without needing an intermediary device like the Connect Clip that uses the legacy standard Bluetooth to connect to your Android phone first.
You didn’t say whether you’re using ASHA to connect your Real with your Android phone or not. How are you talking on your Android phone when you’re not driving currently? If with ASHA between the Android phone and the Real, then this may be where the issue is. And like you said, it’s a contention between the legacy BT connection to your car, and the ASHA BT connection to your Real. Who wins here? Obviously not your car. But it’s not clear if your Real wins either because you said the call goes to the speaker on your Android phone and not the Real.
So I don’t know why the phone call doesn’t go to your Real (assuming that you’re connecting the Real and your Android phone via ASHA, which is not clear because you never said if that’s how you have it set up outside the car). Maybe your Android phone sees the ambiguous contention and doesn’t know which way to route, so it doesn’t route to the car, nor the Real, but instead reverts to the good old phone speaker. As soon as you turn off the Real, the ASHA connection with the Real is gone, so the contention is also gone with it by default, and your Android phone knows clearly where to route the call to now → the car. So it’s not like the Oticon Real is THE culprit. It may be due to whether your Android phone’s ASHA support knows how to resolve multiple BT connection contention, which one to give priority to, or whether it gives the user options to define the routing priority or not.
I don’t have an ASHA Android phone (I use iPhone), so I don’t know exactly how the ASHA stuff is set up on Android phones. I hear that Android phones may not implement ASHA exactly the same way either, depending on how they interpret the ASHA standards, because if there’s ambiguity in the ASHA standard that may cause the Android phone mfgs to interpret differently and hence implement differently, then there’ll be a lot of inconsistency in and of ASHA itself between the various phone makes/models. Anyway, I can only suggest that maybe you try to look into your Android phone’s ASHA setup and see if there’s any option to select/define call routing priority routing or not. If yes, then you’re in luck and now you can control the routing. If not, then it’s not necessarily the Real’s fault if your Android phone’s ASHA support doesn’t give you options to select/define call routing priority if there is a contention.
I have a recent Android phone and I don’t use a Connect Clip for connectivity. When I make phone calls from my vehicle, it performs as expected (uses the vehicle’s mic and speaker). But when I recent a phone call, the sound streams to my hearing aid. That’s pretty glitchy, especially when the call is for a passenger.
As I noted before, I didn’t have this issue with my Phonak aids.
I’ll look to see if I have anything on my phone that will allow me to adjust the ASHA setup, or perhaps “connection-oriented L2CAP channels (CoC) over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)” (whatever that is all about).
I have the samsung S23 android phone, and the Oticon More1 aids, what you are discriping is standard operating for the aids, they will always take highly priority over the cars entertainment system. I had the same issue when i used a iPhone also.
Been wearing aids 20 years and i have a technical background as both IT and electronics tech.
Volusiano writes: “if your Android phone is newer and has ASHA support as well, then the Real can connect to your Android phone directly without needing an intermediary device”
Right. It does. If I’m wandering around, my phone pairs with the Real and I can hear the call, whether I dialed or I answer an incoming call. That works great.
However, my audiologist told me that in the car, the car Bluetooth signal will be stronger, so it will connect before the aid connects. And that’s what happens when I make a call from in the car. It also happens when there is an incoming call, but when I try to answer the incoming call, all Bluetooth disconnects and I’m back to handset only.
cvkemp writes: “they will always take highly priority over the cars entertainment system”
I’m seeing the opposite. The car Bluetooth seems to have priority. But when I’m trying to answer a call, the aids seem to block car Bluetooth and neither connects.
As soon as I get in my Expedition and start it my iPhone 13 Pro Max pairs with the bluetooth module in my Expedition. When I get an incoming call the ringing comes through the speakers. When I answer the call using the touch screen all the incoming sound goes to my Oticon Real aids and it shows “privacy mode” on my touch screen in the dash. My voice is using the microphone in the truck. I can touch the screen and disable “privacy mode” and then everyone in the truck hears the caller. I like it that way. I could change the option in the Expedition if I wanted to disable “privacy mode” on every call. The Ford system is Version 1 and cannot be updated. It has an internal hard drive and boots slowly but it works. FINGERS CROSSED since it is a 2010.
Your Phonak aids are designed to work with the legacy BT, hence its behavior should be consistent with however the legacy BT devices work. None of the other HA brands/models outside of Phonak decided to create a chip for their aids to work with the legacy BT. They’d rather opted for ASHA support on Android phones and then they’ll jump on the ASHA bandwagon. So comparing why it used to work fine with your Phonak aids but now it’s not working with Oticon aids are like comparing apples to oranges because they operate on different BT protocols.
ASHA is still very new compared to the legacy BT which has been around for maybe a couple of decades by now, so there will sure be lots of kinks to work out with ASHA, and even the way different Android phones support ASHA may be slightly different as well.
I really doubt that a stronger BT signal will take over the connection from a weaker BT signal when there’s some kind of contention. It’s more likely that the contention gets resolved based on user-select settings (if available), or based on how the system device is designed to handle the contention. Also, the car BT signal to the phone, based on the legacy BT standard, uses a different protocol than the hearing aids’ BT signal to the phone based on the ASHA protocol. If they don’t talk the same language, it’s unlikely that the big guy can beat the little guy up because they’re not even in the same lane.
Apparently my smartphone doesn’t, or at least it isn’t on this list. However, I’m having no issues with normal Bluetooth connection for streaming from my phone.
Given that Android smartphones represent 71 percent market share in mid-2023, it’s a shame that more attention hasn’t been paid to those users with Android devices. Oticon/Philips brag about their i-Phone compatibility. Yeah, less than 30 percent of the market. Over time, they will function properly with newer Android devices (I guess).
I know Oticon isn’t alone on this issue. But I prefer the direction Phonak took to the issue.
ASHA is dead in the water, LE Audio is here and all the next models will support it, Google hasn’t bothered with anything new for ASHA protocol, pretty sure they have no interest in it anymore, pity tho, it does work well in most cases.
You should be ASHA Certified V!
That is exactly what’s happening, and I know of no solution.
Case in point, when I have my ConnectClip active, and my Mores paired, the calls attempt to ring in on the Mores.
Most times, if I manually tap the CClip icon in the phone dialer app (Pixel5a) it’ll immediately switch back to the Mores, but I’ll get no speech path, so I have to engage the Phone’s speaker, much the same scenario as @user1115.
So, it is ASHA related.
As @cvkemp remarked the HAs take priority.
I don’t know of any work around for this, so we have to quit using our phone in the car!
The problem is, everyone will need to purchase a phone with a SoC which supports LE Audio, and buy HAs that work with it $$$. And i’m thinking 1 to 2 years before there’s compatibility.
Pretty huge investment,no?
There’s no way your Oticon HA is can connect directly with your Android phone via the legacy BT without the Connect Clip. I’m guessing that even though your Android phone isn’t on the ASHA list officially yet, it might have had some form of unofficial ASHA support implemented on it already. Maybe it was late to make that list, or maybe its implementation is not 100% compliant yet, hence it doesn’t make the list yet.
But the fact that you’re able to connect your Oticon HA to your Android phone without the ConnectClip doesn’t mean that your Oticon HA is connecting via legacy BT alone without any ASHA support, simply because it just never worked with older Android phones before. It may appear so, especially if the ASHA connection is integrated into the regular BT interface, so that it would make you think that your Oticon HA is connecting with your Android phone via legacy BT, but for sure it doesn’t, because if it can do that, then Oticon would have advertised the heck out of it already.
I’m sure as a user, everyone would have preferred to see all HA mfgs follow the Phonak decision to implement a special chip for it to work with legacy BT. I’m not sure why they don’t. Perhaps they were incorrectly optimistic that ASHA support would have been available sooner that by the time Phonak got around to getting their SWORD chip to work with legacy BT, ASHA would have already been out and ubiquitous in the land of Android phones. I guess in hindsight, Phonak is right about being more pessimistic with ASHA availability and reliability and their investment in creating the SWORD chip was worth gaining more of the market share for it. Or did the SWORD chip really end up helping them gain more of the market share after all? It’d be interesting to see some data on that specifically.
So they are all ready gearing up for this, so are the HAs/hearables manufacturers, but people do this all the time, update/upgrade to the latest models/devices, nothing new there.
And yes I agree 1 to 2 years at the most, manufacturers are already taking about being compatible now, 5.2 is a possibly to use LE Audio I’ve heard, the market for this is huge and I cannot see any manufacturer wanting to be left behind on this, true wireless stereo broadcast is what we want minimum power consumption and next to no latency, I’m in!
And no need to buy those “extra accessories” like they want us to buy for our TVs/PC (Airstream etc)
