Your Experience Using Phone Microphone with Hearing Aids in Noise

Hearing Aids
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I’ve noticed many hearing aid users make use of their phone’s ambient sound / live listen feature, which streams audio picked up by the phone’s microphone directly to their hearing aids.

This is supposed to help in situations like:

  • Restaurants or group settings: placing the phone on the table near the person you want to hear.

  • Lectures / presentations: placing the phone closer to the speaker to reduce background noise.

  • TV or public places: putting the phone near the TV or loudspeaker to capture the sound.

I’m curious — how well does this work for you in real life?

  • Does it really help in noisy restaurants?

  • Any lag or distortion when watching TV this way?

  • Do you find it better than a dedicated remote mic or TV streamer?

Would love to hear your experiences, both good and bad!

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For what it’s worth, I have never found any advantage from using my iPhone 12 Pro’s microphones in Live Listen and I do struggle in noisy environments like restaurants or in meetings where there are noises off to one side or behind.

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Thanks for sharing, David! Sounds like Live Listen on the iPhone 12 Pro didn’t really help in noisy places.

Has anyone tried it on newer phones? Apple says the latest iPhones (15 / 16) have better mic arrays and noise reduction, so maybe Live Listen works better now.

And what about Android — do Samsung or Pixel phones with “ambient sound” or “hearing aid” features do any better in noisy restaurants or meetings?

Curious to hear your real-world experiences!

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I have not really found Live Listen on my iPhone to help when I am in a group in a cafe.

Apple iPhones have various tweaks I can do to improve sound when I am on a phone call but these are not available in Live Listen!!!

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Sound Amplifier on Pixel 8 Pro. It works as advertised. Latency is within tolerable limits. I’ve managed to understand most of the dialogue on the TV when placing the phone under the TV and going to another room. It didn’t help in a restaurant but I’m not sure anything would have helped in that place. I might have another crack at it but I don’t think it’s a game changer for me.

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Hmm.. for a noisy restaurant the best solution is to clip a microphone to each speaker’s shirt and then stream their sound over to the hearing aids, I think. haha

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Hmm… mainly because it is awkward to ask each speaker to talk to your phone’s microphone directly I guess?

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What I’ve found is that the phone mic gives you a lot more of the reverberance in the room than the hearing aids do. After posting last night I spent a bit of time talking directly into the phone mic admiring the sound of my own voice. Beautiful. So maybe as a person-to-person solution it might work- not so much as a table-top mic.

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I use Live listen in restaurants all the time. It works really well on a round table of max people of 8. Rectangular table not so well.

I’ve not used it in conferences or Public places.

Depending on your HA brand you can buy TV streamers to help hear. You possibly have captions on your TV to help as well.

You can also get a mini mic that the guest speaker can wear that will stream directly to your HA’s. This can be used in a variety of situations. And works extremely well.

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