Very interesting and impressive to scale this down to a hearing aid.
I wonder how representative the audio sample sets are for international sound scenes? Are they sampled in Denmark/Europe?
Still no current and widely available direct Bluetooth connections without the need for Asha protocols available.
Interesting to announce that all Demant products will be getting a new model, including Phillips which suggests Costco’s Phillips model will soon be replaced. I didn’t read every word but I scanned for a release date and did not see anything mentioned. So questions I have:
- When will the Oticon More be available?
- Clarifying Bluetooth compatibility would be nice. My guess is that it will be Made for iPhone and ASHA compatible from the start, but will be upgradeable to Bluetooth 5.2/LE Audio at sometime in the future.
This is good news, but I hope this isn’t “vaporware.” Oticon promised the ConnectClip for over a year before it actually became available.
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It is supposed to be available very soon. In terms of Bluetooth compatibility, from what we were told, it’s Made for iPhone and ASHA compatible as you guessed, so that’s only the very latest Android models.
Thanks. I read more carefully. The closest thing to a release date is “in the coming months.” Doesn’t sound like they’re too sure at this point in time.
In October they said late 2020, so it should be soon:
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In February they said by mid 2020 so it’s drifting quite a lot. Covid probably isn’t helping.
That sounds reasonable. I think ASHA was first released via a firmware update to an existing GE Resound model.
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Is it possible to see ASHA for OPN S via a firmware update? It seems that OPN S will be abandoned from now on. This is not fair, especially for the latest models that are only a year and 3 months old.
OPN S getting a firmware update for ASHA seems feasible. Seems like I remember hearing something quite some back that this was coming. Oticon PR seems to have a reputation for being way out ahead of production.
It looks like the Oticon website has nothing on the Oticon More yet. The links displayed in the announcement simply takes you to Oticon.com and no material on the More can be found there.
If anyone gets these aids, I’d be interested in
1 How well they work (most important)
- How much they cost (so if they do what this ad says, I can save my pennies)
Thanks
Bob
This press release mentions availability in mid December
The new Oticon More™ will be made available from mid-December. Local availability will vary. Please check your local Oticon website or with your hearing care professional.
Seriously - “Oticon More mimics how your brain works”. That’s pretty deep. So two questions I have are - Will all Oticon aids be made with the Oticon More platform going forward? Of just certain aids? Also will the the Oticon More use both chargeable and disposable batteries? Not much info released so far.
I don’t think anybody is going to get them soon as there is not a release date yet. Cost range is easier to predict. For their (Oticon’s) most advanced model (More 1?), it will likely be in the $6000-$7000 range from full service audiologists) Might get it down to ~$4000 with more limited services.
My guess is that all higher end Demant aids will be made with the Polaris platform (that’s the chipset) I’m also guessing that the Velox S platform will continue to be used in lower line aids. I’m also GUESSING that Oticon will retain a different approach to noise processing than their other brands (Sonic, Bernafon and Phillips) but who knows?!
Oticon More mimics how your brain works
That’s awesome, if your brain works as an average one.
However if you need big SNR (anything above 4-5 IMO), I seriously doubt this will be better experience. Or any open paradigm.
If you need higher SNR, you need that additional help in filtering sounds because your brain cannot do it.
Now, we can argue if having aids like this is better and you can push your brain with them and train your brain to need lower SNR or it’s not possible to change SNR needs, and in that case, it won’t be helpful nor training but useless.
No clue if SNR can really go down with training and what type of training will help more - all sounds in or something more targeted. @Neville do you have any clues about it?
I “liked” this quote.
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A lot of vagueness shrouded around the “Deep Neural Network” buzzword. I’d like to see a whitepaper on it to understand better how they decide to “optimize” and “balance” the sounds in their 12 million plus sound scenes.
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I don’t think the open paradigm is about training your brain to need less SNR. It’s just about providing SNR in a different way. Noise reduction is still applied to speech in the OPN for better SNR, it’s just done in a different way, dynamically as opposed to statically. The dynamic noise reduction employed by the OPN is applied momentarily to speech when it’s present, but when speech is not present, it lets the other “noise” come in. The static noise reduction is the traditional way of many hearing aids to block out the “noise” all the times, even when there’s no presence of speech.
I’m guessing that the Oticon More expands on this principle, but with DNN, it is not limited to being able to apply dynamic noise reduction on speech in the front only, but now it can apply to speech in any direction because it can now dynamically come up with a dynamic noise model instead of relying on a location-based (sides and back) noise model like it does on the OPN.
If it can determine through DNN more accurately which sound is which like it claims, it can probably discreetly decide which sound is more desirable to bring forth and which sound to fade out in a sound scene, therefore achieving a better balance. But the sound scene is evaluated dynamically, so the adjustment to the sound scene is constantly instantaneous, giving you the impression consistent of the “open” paradigm.
All this is just a guess from me based on what Oticon is saying. But the bottom line is that I really doubt that it is trying to train the brain to reduce reliance on SNR. It’s probably just applying SNR a lot more smartly and dynamically so that it happens so quick you don’t even notice it.
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I’m most interested to find out if this works well for reverse slope hearing loss. I’ve not been happy with any hearing aids that I’ve tried over the past 10 years and that’s even after trying professional programming and tweaking with self-programming (although self-programming had improved results for me).
OPNs were the next on my list since I’ve tried Phonak (twice) and Resound.