Hey what's going on guys so this is a video that I'm very excited
to record. It is not going to be the greatest quality in the world but this is just too good
not to share. So i'm going to use the equipment that I have to be able to make this happen. As
you tell by the title of the video this is about something that apple has recently rolled out.
They announced this at WWDC this year... where they announced that they were going to start
adding some features to the Airpods Pro, and this is specific to Airpods Pro. They're going to add
some features to Airpods pro that will shake up the hearing aid industry quite a bit. Now
i don't know how much you know but if you're watching this video you probably are like me. You
probably have some moderate to mild hearing loss and have struggled with the cost of hearing aids.
Here in the United States a good pair, a decent pair, of hearing aids in the U.S. will cost you
$2000+ on the cheap end. A pair with bluetooth and some of the more modern features are
running $3000-4000 and, unfortunately, the hearing aid industry has been controlled exclusively by
the medical industry here in the U.S. and it's not an industry that has been commonly supported by
insurance companies and other companies that would normally subsidize the cost of these
these devices. So in short there are a lot of people that have a need for hearing aids that
can't afford them and they've gone often to devices and, I actually have one here
let me pull it out while i'm talking... devices that are often marketed as hearing aids but
are what's really known as personal hearing amplifiers. These hearing amplifiers are often
amplifying all frequencies and, sometimes they have features like this is one here
that I bought a while back. This is made in china and you can see that
on the box there... you can see there it says PSAP, personal hearing amplifier.
That is pretty decent little device. You can see that it came in its own little box and
they're not rechargeable, it does use batteries. It's an in-ear type device and it looks very
much like a hearing aid. This one is very expensive. It was approx. $110 dollars
it actually supports three different levels of frequency... three different types of enhancement.
It'll enhance low frequencies, all frequencies are high frequencies. Unfortunately I tried it
and wore it for a few days and it gave me a very bad headache. I have a an equal in both ears but a
pretty common type of hearing loss where the upper frequencies are lost so things like birds singing,
crickets at night, and speech are affected. Speech is one of the worst things because
higher pitched letters... and there are letters that have kind of a higher pitch... a higher
frequency part of them that makes them inaudible if you can't hear the frequency. So you basically
you you find yourself saying, "What" or "Huh" and/or you find yourself reading lips. Yeah it's
not not fun and, with my children and my wife, I'm often having to ask them to repeat themselves
and it can become frustrating and in general it makes life less enjoyable, especially if you like
to spend times outdoors. You can't hear things like water running and bird singing. It can be
hard and often you don't know what you're missing because you can't hear what you're missing. So...
a little bit of history... earlier in the year the FDA made it legal for companies to start
making aftermarket hearing aids. So they actually put the hearing aid industry in kind of a flux
where there are some manufacturers that are starting to take some of the hearing
aid-specific features and market them over the counter and, I don't know if apple actually
is planning to go even deeper in the hearing aid industry but this feature is an indicator that
they might. So it brings me to this. Airpods Pro. Airpods Pro are awesome. They have...
and this is a terrible camera on my Macbook Pro here but... Airpods pro have
a impressive set of technological features and advancement. They have a chip that's dedicated
to processing onboard sound with transparency mode. Transparency Mode is a basically a feature,
if you're not familiar with it, where you can put the headphones in your ear and as you you can turn
on transparency mode and it passes the sound through the microphones into your ear. This is
an amazing feature because it is indistinguishable from the outside sounds that you're taking in and
normally, in the past, it would take the sounds from the outside put them into your ear exactly
as you would hear them without the headphones in. So if you have a hearing loss normally it would be
indistinguishable because it wasn't changing the frequencies at all as they come into the Airpods.
It wasn't making any processing changes. It was putting it into your ear like it was hearing it.
So at WWDC Apple announced some features called hearing accommodations.
I can actually show you here... let's go into the settings all right and, where you would find this,
as i scroll here, through here... So you go into settings. Then you go to Accessibility... alright
and if you have your Airpods Pro connected, which i'm going to connect them now... alright and once
again i apologize about the quality i will do my best to make this visible. You see Airpods are
listed there and down at the bottom you have what's called audio accessibility settings.
Alright and as you see here you have mono audio... you know the normal stuff... but
up the top you have Headphone Accommodations. Now this is new to iOS 14. To be specific this
is the newest version of iOS. I'm currently on the beta they just rolled out with the
final beta yesterday so, at the time of... this is september 16th 2020... at the time
of recording they should have the final version of iOS 14 released by, I would assume, by next week
if not sooner. So, you may very well already have iOS 14 on your device at the time of actually
watching this video. So, if you see here there's this Audiogram feature I have on my screen now.
This is a new feature to iOS 14 to where you can actually go to custom audio setup and it will it
will basically you can click continue and it will ask you to choose if you can see that there...
Alright so that just says audiograms in white there. You can't actually see it
because of the camera... and this is my last one from... yesterday.... I did a new audiogram...
Say use audiogram and so it's... I don't have my headphones in right now so it's just not actually
allowing me to test it I'm going to cancel that setup because I already have it in. That uses
the audiogram from the Apple Health so inside of Apple Health you actually have the option to set
up an audiogram in Apple Health and now it allows you to use an app like MIMI, which is what i used,
to actually test your hearing using Airpods Pro as your earphones. You put them in,
activate noise canceling mode, so it's like you're in a sound booth,
and it takes you through a hearing test and it's very accurate. I mean it's very
impressive it comes out with my audiogram and i'll actually pull up MIMI here so you can see
Alright so and that's my current hearing results and you see there it says moderate.
If i actually click it tells me that i have moderate hearing loss. My audiogram...
let me show you my audiogram... this is my audiogram as you see there's that
classic dip. Now it's only one, two, three, four, five, six frequencies that it tests but
that's enough, in my experience. Six frequencies.
A lot of these higher end hearing aids actually have... They'll go up to 16 frequencies and get
very very detailed in the frequency loss. If you have a moderate hearing loss in my experience
these six frequencies are quite enough to actually get a pretty good enhancement to your hearing
and correction to your hearing. So, I did the audio test. It took the audiogram
and It saved the audiogram and you saw I have a few tests here... that was the
one that was probably the most accurate... You see they're all pretty close in their results
and what it does is inside of audio accessibility and headphone accommodations it puts the audiogram
and, what that actually did before yesterday, is that had you had down at the bottom here... it
applies to the phone and media... so your phone calls and your media, like music and movies,
would sound amazing. It corrected the sounds. So it would increase the frequencies that you're
naturally unable to hear well so it was super impressive. Like music sounded like I haven't
heard it sound like in years. Alright, so yesterday... when I put my my Airpods in...
and it connects you'll see that yesterday they added this feature here where it says "Apply to
Transparency Mode". So if i click on transparency mode you actually see now that it has custom
transparency mode and it allows me to change amplification, the balance, and it actually I
can tweak the tone. So if I've never worn hearing aids before and my audiogram is a little tinny
I can come in here and make it a little darker to make it a little more comfortable.
I'm fine with it. Actually yesterday... just a little quick story... I did this, installed the
update, I had to restart my phone and I had my headphones in and I had my window rolled down.
I live in the middle of a forest and I have lots of birds and things that I normally couldn't hear
and, when that turned on and I had my my headphones in it was like the mute button
was turned off on my ears. It was incredible and the enhancement and the correction was perfect
and, I can say from experience, I tested a pair of Phonac...like four thousand dollar,
very high-end bluetooth, last year's bluetooth hearing aids... behind the ear hearing aids...
and I hated them. They sounded terrible. They were they were programmed with my audiogram
from a hearing test but they sounded mechanical and tinny and because they were behind the ear
it was very strange. Sounds were enhanced from behind my head. There was no directional sound...
it's very uncomfortable. I can tell you that these... they're in your ear and because Apple has
fine-tuned this technology where transparency mode was already perfect... It uses that transparency
mode that they've already perfected to simply amplify the sounds based on your audiogram.
It's better than any hearing aids I've ever used and to put a comparison here
these devices are $200...I got these for $170. Alright, I showed you that little
amplifier that I bought. That was $100. For two of them it would have been more expensive and they're
not rechargeable you have the cost of batteries to consider there. $200 plus the cost of batteries
for just personal hearing amplifiers that go in your ear. Now they're more concealable and
there is a little bit of a paradigm shift here because people that want to start using these
as hearing aids will wear their Airpods all the time. Now there may be a social
impact here. People may feel like you're being rude if you have your headphones in and you're
talking to them. You know there may be a little bit of an impact there... but there's already a
stigma about hearing aids anyway. So for a lot of people this may be actually more accessible
for them to Airpods than to feel uncomfortable with the stigma about wearing hearing aids. So
just wearing one like I am right now, it's it's fantastic. Two of them is amazing. So, you know,
there is that little bit of consideration that if you're replacing your hearing aids with these or
using these as hearing aids there may be some appearance issues there. But, outside of that
they're incredible. So I highly, highly, highly recommend that if you're considering buying
Airpods Pro to use them as hearing aids... do it. You won't regret it. It's
just in the past two days that I've used these I can already tell that this is going to be a
life-changing thing for me in times where I need to be able to hear. I watched a movie last night
I didn't have to read the subtitles. I could actually hear what they were
saying. I was playing my guitar and there's no lag whatsoever. I was able to play guitar
and hear the tones in the guitar better than I've heard in years, if not better than ever.
And there is, one minor thing that will take some getting used to. If you've ever used hearing aids
there's a thing called the occlusion effect. So when you have something in your ears and you talk
or you chew there's that feeling of like you're in a bucket
that happens with anything that you have on your ear. So if you if you have hearing aids, often
you'll get that occlusion effect with just regular expensive hearing aids. So you do have to be aware
that there will be an occlusion effect with these and because there is a really tight seal in your
ear with these silicone tips there will be a little bit of an occlusion effect when you speak.
The longer you wear them the more natural that will sound. That occlusion effect is
not just because you have something in your ear but It's also because you're hearing your voice
and frequencies of your voice that you haven't heard in a long time
so don't give up on them with the occlusion effect just take a break pull one out you put leave one
in eventually you'll get used to it and you'll not even remember that they're in your ears.
That happened to me the last time I wore a pair of hearing aids it did go away eventually and the
occlusion effect wasn't as noticeable because I got used to it. There is also the comfort issue.
I do recommend, if you're going to wear these for a long period, to get the memory foam
tips. The silicone tips that they come with may work well for you but for me I've ordered a pair
of the memory foam tips to seal a little better in my ear. They do these do have a
history of falling out of my ears so... I do have strange ears... So these have a history of just
eventually when I'm chewing or talking without warning they'll just slide out of my ear. So,
I got some memory talk memory foam tips from ebay for like $8 that will hopefully fix that for me
and I can wear these when I'm being more active. But anyway I hope this video was super helpful
for you and if it has been leave a comment down below I would love to hear your stories about how
this has changed your life or your stories about how this will impact your life in the future.