The Hearing Tech That's Actually Making a Difference

After one of our recent town halls, an attendee wrote in with a great tip we wanted to pass along. Like a lot of folks in our community, they live with significant hearing loss and have spent years finding what actually helps in noisy rooms — restaurants, family gatherings, seminars like ours.

Their answer isn't a hearing aid upgrade, though that's part of it. It's a small wireless microphone, the Phonak Roger On, that streams a speaker's voice directly to their hearing aids from up to 50 feet away.

Set it on a table and it picks up everyone around it. Clip it to a presenter and you can hear them clearly even if they're walking around without a house mic. There's even a way to "aim" it at just one part of a table so you're not fighting the noise from the rest of the room.

Paired with newer hearing aids that do their own AI-driven noise filtering, they told us it's the first time in over a decade of wearing hearing aids that they could sit at a full table in a packed restaurant and actually follow the conversation.

Bonus tip: AI recorders for appointments and meetings

They also passed along a tip that has nothing to do with hearing loss but is worth knowing about anyway: small AI recorders, sold under names like Pocket, that record a conversation and hand you back a summary and a to-do list afterward.

Handy for a doctor's appointment where it's easy to miss something, or any meeting you'd rather just be present for instead of scribbling notes.