Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Live Listen on your iPhone.
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So Live Listen allows you to use your iPhone and your AirPods or some Beat headphones and
basically it works kind of like a hearing aid. The microphone on your iPhone will be used to capture
sound in the environment around you and then amplified to your AirPods so you can hear better.
So check out this page at Apple's site (support.apple.com/en-us/Ht209082) to
make sure everything you've got is compatible. It says here you need iOS or iPad OS 14.3 or newer,
although it did work on earlier versions of iOS. Then you need any AirPod. The regular old AirPods,
the AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max. It also works with a couple of Beats
as well. The idea here is that you put your AirPods in and then you can use your
iPhone to listen. So the mike on your iPhone is going to pick up sound
and transmit it here. But it could process it a little bit to make it easier to hear things.
So let's set it up here by going into Settings on the iPhone and then you would think you would
go to Accessibility to turn this on. But, in fact, that's not where you look! Look in Control Center.
In Control Center you want to make sure you add Hearing to the top part. The active
included controls. So if you find Hearing down here just click the Plus button to move
it up here. Now you can get to this by going to Control Center. I'm going to swipe down from the
upper right hand corner and you could see the Hearing Icon there. Click that and you may find
that the background sounds, if you're using that, also appears here. But you've got Live Listen.
So to turn it On just click here and it turns it on. You can see now the input coming in
here. It will tell you if the sound level is too high. It's easy to turn it Off as well.
Click there and you can see now it is Off. Basically what is happening
is the iPhone is trying to listen for voices and it's amplifying those voices while trying to drown
out background noise and other distractions. So it makes it easier to hear people.
Kind of like a hearing aid but it's never going to be quite as good as an actual hearing aid
which you have to spend a lot of money for and has to be customized to fit your exact needs.
But there are a couple of interesting ways to use this because unlike a hearing aid
your iPhone doesn't have to be at the same place as your AirPod. You can actually put the iPhone
somewhere else. So, for instance, if you're having trouble hearing the television and you rather not
turn the volume up too high you could place your iPhone near the TV or maybe point the microphone
directly at the speaker on the TV to get better sound into your AirPods. The same thing with a
conversation. You might find that maybe you're sitting in one part of a room and most of the
conversation is going on in another part of the room, you could always put your iPhone down near
where the people are talking so you can hear them clearer while you sit somewhere else. Of course
you could use this as kind of a baby monitor or spying device by placing your iPhone in
one location and then within the range of the AirPod sitting in another room and listening
in. It could be useful, say, for listening for things like an oven or dryer indicating that it's
done while you go into another room. Or, for instance, if you need to run into the other room
for some reason and you want to keep listening to the TV while the other people are there
in the room watching it. You could still get the audio even while you are in another room.
Another use is if you are at a meeting or conference and you find you're having trouble
hearing the speaker you can point your iPhone, perhaps, at one of the speakers
there or directly at the person talking and may find you can hear them a little bit better
than listening without it. So there's all sorts of little interesting uses like that.
I should point out here, in case you didn't know, the the microphone on your iPhone is right here
along the bottom. So what you want to do is point the bottom of your iPhone towards the
TV or the person speaking to get the best sound from them.
So if you have AirPods or some of those Beatz Headphones
give this a try to see what it is like. You may be surprised at how well sound comes through and how
it may improve your chances to participate in conversations if your hearing isn't that good.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.