What you call underlying technology, I call them peripheral technologies. That’s because the biggest marketing item for the Oticon aids is the Deep Neural Network AI, which is its underlying core technology. The underlying core technology for the Philips aids seems to be a different kind of AI machine learning that uses hundreds of thousands of noisy speech samples to train the machine to clean out the noise from the speech samples. Meanwhile, the Oticon DNN sampled 2 million sound scenes (not just noisy speech samples like with the Philips AI) to rebuild and rebalance them through the DNN.
So I would contend that even though Oticon and Philips share many “peripheral” technologies, their underlying core technologies (which is the AI) are significantly different enough. The software parameters in the programming software for these 2 aids (Oticon Genie 2 and Philips HearSuite) for the 2 AIs are COMPLETELY different.
But as I mentioned in my previous post above, it’s possible that the Bernafon Alpha XT 9 AI is the same as the Philips 9040 AI, because both talk about an AI core technology that is trained to clean up the noise from noisy speech samples.
Many people just look at features/specs/accessories and jump to the conclusion that these Oticon and Philips and Bernafon aids are all the same. It’s understandable that they share a lot of peripheral technologies because they’re all sister companies or licensee (in the case of Philips) under William Demant, so it makes sense to do so to save money instead of reinventing the wheels on the basic stuff. But the marketing brochures usually just list out the features and don’t necessarily go into the details of the core technology the aids have. This level of details is usually only found by researching and reading the technical whitepapers from those companies in order to know the difference. So just by glancing through the marketing materials for feature lists and specs and review the accessories, it may not sufficiently be 100% conclusive to say that they are exactly the same aids, just rebadged versions of each other.