ScanSoft: Will Speech Processing Go The Way Of The Kurzweil Reader?
I frequently entertain myself with a futuristic vision of high-tech eyeglasses equipped with a tiny microphone, a tiny speech processing chip, and a tiny holographic projector that can transcribe everyday conversation in real time and project it in front of my eyes like the closed-captioning system on my TV. Believe it or not, all the technologies required to create such a product are known — it will only take another 10 or 15 (okay, maybe 20) years of development before we see such a device. Read more
Go America is Going Places
I’d heard of Go America in the go-go days of the dot-com boom, but back then it was just one of a million hot new suppliers of wireless data services for handheld computers. I never knew about its Wyndtell subsidiary, which focused exclusively on providing telecommunications services for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Read more
Sound ID Has A Sound Idea
Sound ID is a Silicon Valley start-up that is finally breaking down the barriers between consumer electronics and the hearing aid industry. It is developing a Bluetooth-based product that will make it easier for everyone — consumers with normal hearing and hearing-impaired people alike — to understand voices on the other end of their cellphones in noisy environments. Read more
Did Songbird Croak? Will It Rise From The Ashes?
Developing the first disposable hearing aid was one of my many great ideas that somebody else had first. Read more
William Austin, Hearing-Aid Promoter Extraordinaire
The only thing William Austin seems to work at harder than promoting himself is promoting the benefits of hearing aids. But in fact, the two go hand in hand. Over the past 40 years, the founder of Starkey Laboratories, one of the world’s seven dominant hearing aid manufacturers, has waged what at times has seemed a one-man war against the stigma of wearing hearing aids. Read more
Why Don’t They Lock the ‘Off’ Switch?
Here’s a small gripe. I recently bought a SoundWizard personal microphone and amplifying system from Hi-Tec. It’s a very cool multi-purpose device. It’s got two 3.5 mm plugs for your neckloop, earpods or headphones. Read more
How Many of Us Are There?
The hearing-impaired population is huge and growing. But a surprisingly small percentage of people who need hearing aids choose to use them. Read more
A Comment on Amplified Phone Design
You can tell it’s an amplified phone by the size of the buttons. A lot of hearing impaired people are old, and a lot of old people also have trouble with their vision. Therefore, most amplified phones are designed with HUGE buttons with ENORMOUS numbers on them. It’s great the manufacturers can kill two birds with one stone. But consumers aren’t birds. I don’t need the big buttons, thank you. Read more
Bells and Whistles: My Search for the Perfect Amplified Phone
I recently went through a long process acquiring an amplified phone. If you’re a phone junkie like I am, you will want all the bells and whistles, even the ones you rarely use. Until recently, there wasn’t much to choose from. Perhaps the market for these souped-up devices was just so small, or the technology to make phones work well for hearing-impaired people was so expensive, that most phone manufacturers didn’t bother. However, recently we have seen an increasing number of options available, from both traditional and new suppliers. Read more
What About Cochlear Implants?
There’s a terrific story in today’s Wall Street Journal about the rapid increase in the number of children receiving implants before the age of three. To date approximately 10,000 children have received cochlear implants in the U.S., and the reported results are outstanding: kids who in the past would have found it very difficult to develop normal speech are able to start hearing early enough to learn spoken language at a normal developmental age. Read more