This quote from the HT article by Karl Strom on Infinio Sphere, originally cited by @flashb1024
(see Phonak Audéo Sphere - #117 by AbramBaileyAuD for the full-article).
Along with some others from the media, I had the opportunity to try out this app function during a demonstration of the Audéo Sphere Infinio RIC. We were in a very noisy conference room with a lot of background noise and piped-in music. As I faced and talked with Phonak Research Audiologist Anne Miller, I could hear her voice very clearly and with good sound quality. Then, as she walked around me, I could variably hear or not hear her, depending on my adjustments to the DNN within the app. However, Anne’s voice was almost completely attenuated if she was speaking behind me and the conversational volume suddenly rose in a group in front of me. So, listening intent remains a tricky part of the AI-driven hearing equation. It’s not perfect, but having tried out countless hearing aids for over 30 years (and now with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss of my own), I was very impressed with the device and how well it zoomed in on speech in a crowded, noisy, reverberant room.
The smartphone app could have an interface with avatars of different voices it hears around your head in relative clock positions to the direction you’re facing. If you tap on an avatar for a voice to your right, that voice is temporarily made louder relative to overall room noise. You could go from avatar to avatar of speakers around you. Long press on the one you want to hear in preference to the others, and the DNN locks onto that one as much as possible and follows that voice wherever it goes (or your head goes, if you turn to look at something while you’re still listening to your preferred speaker). If you could have a version of the MyPhonak app on a smartwatch like the Apple Watch 10, maybe if you turned to look at what you wanted to hear and tapped (or double-tapped) your thumb and index finger together, you could immediately switch speech focus in the direction that you were looking from whatever you’d locked onto before in a difficult listening environment (Apple already has gesture control for the Apple Watch 10 introduced in the fall of 2023).