- Hi, guys.
Cliff Olson, doctor of audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Phoenix, Arizona.
And in this video,
I'm gonna show you how you can use your hearing aids
to talk on your phone completely hands-free.
Coming up!
(upbeat music)
In 2013, we saw the release of the first hearing aids
that could connect directly with an iPhone
to stream audio into your hearing aids
without having to use an intermediary device
like a neck loop.
This was made possible by the development
of a new wireless technology
called Bluetooth Low Energy
that made it possible to transfer audio data
from an iPhone directly
into a pair of Made for iPhone hearing aids.
This battery-friendly form of Bluetooth technology
made it possible for hearing aids to do things
that you could never do with hearing aids before.
Some of these improvements included an app
on your smartphone that you could use to adjust the settings
of your hearing aids
and the ability to stream audio directly
from your phone into both of your devices.
This means that you could listen to music, TV, podcasts,
audio books, YouTube videos,
or even phone calls directly into both of your hearing aids
from an iPhone at any given time.
Not only did this significantly improve the clarity
of the sound that you streamed directly
into both of your hearing aids,
it also made hearing aids more fun to use
and more convenient to use
because it made it possible to listen
to whatever you want to,
whenever you want to.
It is really hard to express
just how much of a game changer Bluetooth Low Energy was
for individuals with hearing loss.
There was one major problem of this Bluetooth Low Energy.
But before I get into what that problem was,
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That being said,
let's go ahead and take a look at what that major flaw was.
You see, before direct Bluetooth streaming capabilities
became available,
if you wanted to stream audio
from a device into your hearing aids,
you had to use some type of an intermediary device
to act as a relay point to get that sound into your devices.
A lot of these things were like a neck loop
that you'd wear around your neck
or something that you'd have to clip to your shirt.
While this was a pain in the butt
because you had to remember
to charge these streaming devices
and actually take them with you when you left the house,
it did make it possible to be hands-free on the phone
because the microphones of those devices
would pick up your voice
and send it to the person on the other end of the line.
This meant that you could just keep your phone
in your pocket while you're having a phone conversation
and you could keep your hands free
to do things like cooking dinner or driving a car.
While Bluetooth Low Energy hearing aids were fantastic
because you no longer needed
one of these intermediary devices,
you could not be hands-free on these phone calls
because there was no two-way audio transfer.
This meant that if you were on a phone call
using your iPhone
and you were streaming the audio into your hearing aids,
you still had to have your phone out to talk into,
so they can hear you.
Not only is this inconvenient,
but as of 2022,
nearly all states in the United States
have imposed some kind of ban against using a handheld phone
while you're driving,
whether it's a complete ban of a cell phone
while you're driving,
or whether it's you just not being able to use it
when driving through a school zone.
Not to mention, with our innate human desire to multitask,
no one wants to have to hold the phone when talking anymore.
This is why having the ability to be hands-free
when talking on the phone is such a big deal
and why it's so cool that Oticon, today's video sponsor,
now lets you talk 100% hands-free when using an iPhone
with their hearing aids.
With an update
to the Low Energy Bluetooth protocol for iPhones,
you can now use an Oticon hearing aid
that is on the Polaris platform,
so you no longer have to hold your phone
when you're talking on the phone.
After a firmware update to your Oticon hearing aids
by your hearing care professional,
it will make it possible to enable two-way audio streaming
when you're on a phone call
or when you're on a video call with select iOS devices.
It does this by enabling the microphones
on your hearing aids to pick up your voice
to send to the person on the other end of the line.
To enable this feature on the iPhone,
you first need that firmware update
by your hearing care professional.
And then to activate two-way audio,
you will need to go to the MFI menu
by dragging down on the top right corner of your phone
and click on the Ear icon.
This will allow you to change the input options
of your own voice to Automatic, Left, Right, or Off.
If you choose Automatic, Left, or Right,
your voice will be picked up
by your hearing aid microphones.
If you select Off,
then you will need to continue to talk
into your iPhone's microphone.
Now there is a major benefit
that a lot of people are overlooking
when it comes to this feature,
and that is the ability to choose
whether or not you were going to go hands-free
with your phone
or if you still want to be able to talk into your phone.
Because if you're in a noisy situation,
sometimes the person that you're talking to
will hear you better
if you still hold your phone up to your mouth.
This is something that you cannot toggle
between with some other hands-free hearing aids.
Being able to be hands-free on the phone
is an amazing feature
that improves upon the already impressive lineup
of Oticon hearing aids that are on the Polaris platform,
which is the first line of hearing aids
that uses a deep neural network to perform deep learning.
Essentially, instead of having to rely
on an engineer's ability to create algorithms
that tell your hearing aids how to process sound,
Oticon's deep neural network was trained
with over 12 million sound samples
to better identify what components
of sound make speech-speech
and noise-noise.
The result was an extremely popular Oticon More hearing aid
that could process sound in a completely different way
than any hearing aid that came before it.
And now this technology has worked its way
into the Oticon Zircon hearing aids
and the Oticon Play PX hearing aids.
At the end of the day,
the advancement of hearing aid technology never stops.
And adding new features to already amazing hearing aids
is something that we will continue to see for years to come.
So if that one feature that you've been waiting for
is the ability to go hands-free
when talking on your iPhone,
I'm happy to say that the wait is over.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions,
leave them in the comment section below.
If you liked the video, please share it.
If you wanna see other videos just like this one,
go ahead and hit that Subscribe button.
Also, feel free to check out my website, drcliffaud.com.
(upbeat music)