I notice that when MoreSoundBooster (called SpeechBooster on the new app) is mentiioned in this forum half the people say it does what it claims to do - ‘focusing on speech sounds in front of you and suppressing other sounds around you’ - and half say it does nothing at all. I am in the second group. It really does not make the slightest difference at all, and I really wish it did. Does anyone have any idea why it doesn’t work for some of us? Is it anything to do with the other settings on the HAs? Or what else?
I use to believe it made no difference, but after the last firmware update and some minor adjustments to my aids I now notice the difference if I am in a restaurant or a meeting. Even at home watching TV I can focus my aids to the TV instead of using the TV adapter.
I don’t have anything but the default program programmed in my aids and it is all I need but the MoreSoundBoast really does add to my speech understanding.
thank you for your answer That’s what I’ve always wanted to know 
Thanks for your reply. I am genuinely happy for you. But what I want to know is, why doesn’t this work for me? Do you know what your recent adjustments were?
With MoreSound Booster activated, I can not hear cars behind me at all.
Might be worth seeing if you can hear cars if you activate it when outside.
Might tell you if it’s actually working at all?
Our hearing loss could be very different tho.
1 Like
It depends on the way the adjustment is done to your aids, it is possible that the aids have it enabled all the time. I know I had complained that I wasn’t hearing around me the way I used to and my audiologist made a few changes to my aids. And I was able to hear better at least on the sides. I do a lot of hiking and walking in the the forest here and I have to be able to hear all around in that environment.
Does that just affect sound through the microphones or streaming too?
It is just the way that the microphones on the aids are focused. So no it doesn’t effect the streaming, that s what the equalizer is for.
I think this technology is like Phonak’s fixed-directional microphone, because Oticon usually says his technology is 360-degree open listening, if sometimes you have difficulty hearing, you can turn on this function, it will pay more attention to the sound in front of you
I assumed it made some change in speech recognition algorithms.
Not sure about that, I believe what my audiologist said was t just does a directional shift in the focus of the aids’ microphones
1 Like
I don’t know how it works or what it does, but I have used it with both results. The first time I tried it I really didn’t notice much difference with it on or off. I was at a restaurant with one person seated directly across from me and turned it on and off a couple of times and eventually convinced myself that it might be doing something, but it definitely wasn’t a big improvement. However, recently I went to a restaurant with the same friend. I arrived first, and as I sat at the table waiting for her to arrive the noise of the restaurant was so loud that it was uncomfortable. I thought we were going to have to leave, because it was going to be pointless - I couldn’t handle the noise, nevermind trying to have a conversation (it was a crowded, pretty small restaurant with very high ceilings). I turned down the volume on my aids (which I never do - I’m a put them in and forget them person normally) but when my friend arrived I realized that I also could not hear her with the volume down. When I turned the volume up I turned on the MoreSound Booster, but didn’t expect much. Once we got into conversation I had no troubles. I actually was amazed at my lack of problems, and the fact that the background noise wasn’t interfering with understanding her nearly as much as I expected, but didn’t actually attribute it to the booster until we were leaving and I remembered that I had turned it on.
I don’t know why it didn’t seem to do anything at the first restaurant but was great at the second. I wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that the tables were more spread out at the second restaurant, so it was esier to focus on my friend? At the first restaurant the tables were very close together, so other people (and their conversations 
) were much closer, even if the overall volume of ‘noise’ was less?
1 Like
Thanks for these replies. Keep them coming, I’m anxious to learn from others’ experience. If it’s meant to turn off or turn down the back facing microphones, I’m wondering why it doesn’t do that for me.
I remember when I first got my OPN, I tried the Directionality Settings and set it to Full Directional and expect it to perform like the traditional beam forming approach, but didn’t find it to aggressively block out noise behind and on the sides like it should. This Full Directional setting should be basically what the (now called) Speech Booster works, blocking sounds from the sides and behind to let you focus in front. This Full Directional setting has been available from the OPN to the OPN S to the More and the Real just the same. In the OPN and OPN S, it’s part of what Oticon calls the OpenSound Navigator. In the More and Real, it became the Spatial Balancer that’s part of the MoreSound/RealSound Intelligence (see first screenshot below).
It made me curious and I did some experiment. Usually in a Full Directional traditional beam forming setting, there’s a phenomenon where a floor noise can be heard when it’s quiet enough for you to notice. So I looked for that floor noise in the Full Directional mode in a quiet place, and sure enough I did hear it. I sat in front of a fan (to act as a noise source) on a rotating office chair and as I rotate the chair, the fan noise is attenuated when it’s behind me or on the side, and sounds normal when it’s in front of me. However, it’s not like it’s aggressively attenuated; I can still hear it, albeit not as loud as when it was in front of me. It may be that Oticon doesn’t like to do aggressive beam forming attenuation to keep things consistent with its promoted open paradigm.
But nevertheless, despite this experiment proving to me that the Full Directional mode works as intended, it still does not seem to be aggressive enough when put in real life use. When I’m in a noisy cafeteria, toggling between Open Auto and Full Directional programs didn’t seem to matter much to me.
I will offer a theory below as to why it’s effective in some cases but not in other cases. My theory is based on the fact that Oticon uses a Voice Activity Detector to detect multiple speech cues and make an exception in its MVDR beam forming strategy and void null directions attenuation where the Voice Activity Detector senses speech in the back or the sides. This may be the culprit as to why Full Directionality mode doesn’t always work aggressively (see more text in the third screenshot below that talks about it from an Oticon whitepaper). If you’re in a restaurant environment where there are speeches detected behind or to your sides, it lessens the effectiveness/aggressiveness of the Full Directionality beam forming to allow you to hear those not-in-front speeches, hence the integrity of the beam forming is compromised.
In the second screenshot below, in Figure 3, you can see that Oticon employs the 2 mics on each aid and the front mic is set to omni-directional and the back mic is set to a back-facing cardioid pattern to create a noise model to be attenuated from the omni-directional pattern. However, in Figure 4, you can see that the presence of the speaker in the rear left opens up that field a bit to allow that speaker to be heard, but effectively lessens the attenuation of the 2 cars’ noise. In theory, you would think that the Full Directional mode should disregard this rear left speaker, and only takes him/her into account if the Directionality Setting is in Neural Automatic. But apparently if Oticon doesn’t fully disregard that rear left speaker and still gives weight to his/her presence despite the Full Directional setting, then that would explain why it wouldn’t work out so well in this case. But if there are no rear or side speakers presence, but only other kinds of noises, then the Full Directionality mode may work better. So this is probably why it works sometimes and not other times for some people, and even differently for the same person in different situations.
The third screenshot below is some explanation of how Oticon makes exception to allow access to multiple speech cues. For sure initially at least in the OPN and OPN S, this feature is strongly weighted in favor of the open paradigm. But perhaps somewhere down the line in a firmware update for the More, Oticon might have decided to give favor to the Full Directionality model and give access to multiple speech cues less weight, hence the observation by some users that a firmware update seems to make the MoreSound Booster (now simply the Speech Booster) to work more effectively.
1 Like
Thanks for that explanation @Volusiano! If I’m understanding correctly what its saying, think that makes my different experience at different restaurants make sense. The first restaurant was set up with tables very close together in long rows. So I was seated at a table, with tables directly on either side of me - one side especially close. So I was sitting with someone quite close on either side of me, with my friend in the same situation on the other side of the table. All of these people were having separate conversations, so even though MoreSound Booster was turned on, maybe my HAs were not truly blocking out the other voices because they were perceived as close enough that I could be trying to hear them. However, in the second scenario, the tables were sort of randomly placed around the restaurant at different angles so although there were lots of people around and LOTS of noise, all of the voices other than my friend were far enough away that they blended into the noise, if that makes sense.
I think SpeechBooster is made for Oticon Real only, and this switch cannot turn on MoreSoundBooster or OpenSoundBooster in older Oticon models Opn(S) (and Xceed) and More.
OK, your observation seems to be consistent with my guess/theory then. If the voices are blended in instead of being distinct, I think they’ve then become what folks call babbles now instead of speeches. The babbles are considered part of the “diffused” noise that permeates all around the room and around you, and it is present and blended into the front as well. If you were trying to focus on the speech in front and there’s no speech behind or to your sides, this diffused noise is still also present with your front speech.
In the original OPN and OPN S, Oticon devised a unit called Noise Removal to take care of this diffused noise (see the screenshot below). The Analyze and Balance modules is part of the Spatial Balancer in the More and Real (as seen in the blue image in my previous post), and in the OPN/OPN S, the Noise Removal model after them removes the diffused noise (by subtracting the Noise Estimate from the omni-directional sound scene). In the More/Real, instead of using the Noise Removal module that was used in the OPN/S, they replaced it with the DNN that does the Neural Noise Suppression.
1 Like
I think SpeechBooster is just the renamed MoreSoundBooster which is just the renamed OpenSoundBooster. As far as I can tell, it’s not anything new and fancy that didn’t exist before the Real. The only 2 new features in the Real are the Sudden Sound Stabilizer and Wind & Handling Stabilizer. Oticon never advertised the SpeechBooster as a never-seen-before new exclusive feature in the Real.
I would have thought Oticon would have renamed the Booster feature to RealSound Booster to be consistent with its renaming convention from before. But perhaps the name RealSound Booster implies that its previous XSound Boosters were FakeSound Booster, hence the rename to SpeechSound Booster to avoid any possible implication of FakeSound Booster.
@Volusiano: I LOVE reading your posts, MrV … They’re so … Exact!!
1 Like