One thing that is a bummer about this feature is if you have little to no hearing loss you cant turn it on anyways to "enhance" your hearing.
My son's audiologist is (of course) quite bearish on this whole prospect. Her response was to ask who is going to do the audiogram programming for the airpods.
I imagine this is probably something that could be automated away, though.
I feel like that's letting perfect be in the way of better.
Are airpods the best hearing aid? no, but they cost 1/5 the cost from what I'm seeing for 'cheap' professionally fit & programmed hearing aids which opens it up to a lot of people who otherwise might be struggling to interact with the world.
Yep. They're also a hearing aid that isn't conspicuously a hearing aid (i.e. "I'm not hard of hearing, I was just listening to some music earlier and haven't taken them out"). For younger users who might feel self-conscious about using a hearing aid, that's a big plus.
> who is going to do the audiogram programming for the airpods.
you mean using the gram output as filter stack? That's in the options > airpods > on the bottom.
It can also scan in a printed audiogram (using the camera) and apply corrections based on that.
> I imagine this is probably something that could be automated away, though.
Even if it isn't, the audio programming capability can likely be added to the software completely eliminating hardware costs for anyone who already owns Airpods.
I wanted to try this for auditory processing disorder, but I passed the hearing test with flying colors, so it won't let me try. Is this some regulatory thing?
Not likely. It needs to build a profile of what sounds you can’t hear in order to know what to specifically make louder, if there’s nothing to specifically make louder, then the feature cannot work. Just turn up the volume, or increase the noise cancelling, or turn on voice isolation, or whatever you actually want it to do.
My hope is that it will one day be able to attenuate the speech of people I'm not trying to listen to.