Fortell

"HearingTracker believes this could be an extremely valuable trend for hearing aid consumers, and a practice we hope future patient-centered manufacturers will adopt at least once per product cycle." HearingTracker's Karl Strom, writing about AI 2.0 and what it means when a hearing aid's core listening performance can improve after it has already been fitted and purchased. His piece covers how we retrained the model on real-world audio from the places people actually struggle to hear. It also gets into what our testing showed across 80 speech-in-noise scenes, and why the update model may matter more than any single result. HearingTracker and HearAdvisor are running their own independent testing of AI 2.0 now. We're looking forward to seeing it. Link to the piece in the comments.

Thanks to Entrepreneur News for the thorough write-up. The number we think about most is how many people can follow a conversation at dinner again.

Every existing Fortell AI Hearing Aid is measurably better today than it was yesterday. Introducing Fortell AI 2.0, a major upgrade to our core AI, arriving as an over-the-air update to all of our patients. AI 2.0 is meaningfully better at the two things a Fortell is already best at: elevating conversation above background noise, and keeping those conversations sounding natural. Our scientists measured an average SNR improvement of 2.1 dB and a 4.1 dB improvement in challenging multi-speaker noise. 4 dB is like pulling your chair 35% closer to the person you are trying to hear. These improvements are enabled by major augmentations to our training data which our team collected in noisy spots around New York City.  Every Fortell patient receives AI 2.0 at no cost via an over-the-air update. That’s unprecedented in this industry. Legacy hearing aid manufacturers typically use software updates to sell more hearing aids. We think it’s smarter, in the long run, to be generous with the people who’ve trusted us with their hearing. Read about AI 2.0 on our blog: https://lnkd.in/gwjeNg4k

HUGE DAY at Fortell: we release AI 2.0 as a free over-the-air update for all patients. It’s a significant improvement in core listening and adds AURACAST! https://lnkd.in/gt4miqkb

"How can you help someone on their worst day? A good answer is often the foundation of a great business." That's our co-founder and CEO Matthew de Jonge, in a wide-ranging conversation with Adam Mendler about building Fortell. His own answer to that question came from watching his grandparents. His grandfather fled Nazi Germany as a child, enlisted in the Army, and went to Princeton on the GI Bill. By his late seventies he had expensive hearing aids and still couldn't keep up at family dinners, and Matt describes watching him say less and less until he was mostly just smiling and nodding. All four of his grandparents went through some version of the same thing, and Fortell grew out of watching it happen. Matt also gets into why the team spent five years building before shipping anything, why a slightly better hearing aid was never going to be enough, and what he's learned about hiring, saying no, and staying close to patients. Full conversation linked below.

Not exactly the typical founder origin story. We loved this telling of Igor Lovchinsky’s journey, from concert halls to physics labs to building technology designed to help people hear better.

"In healthcare, people rarely visit you when they're happy. They come because they have a frustrating problem. There's something meaningful about earning a patient's trust and helping them find a solution for a tangible problem that's impacting their day-to-day life." Meet Dr. Janet Kim, our newest audiologist at Fortell's Park Avenue clinic. Dr. Kim started as a psychology major at James Madison University, knew she wanted a career where she could help people directly, and stumbled onto the Communication Sciences and Disorders program while scanning the university's major list, which is where she found her way to audiology. She trained at Cornell and brings years of clinical expertise from major medical settings to Fortell. What draws her to the work is the trust that builds with patients over time. Around the time she was fielding questions from more and more of her patients, Fortell reached out as the NYC clinic was expanding. When she demo'd the devices, the reduction in background noise was noticeable right away. Outside the clinic, Dr. Kim ran the New York City Marathon last fall, is a regular at the AMC theater, and can be found trying new cafes and escape rooms around the city. Dr. Kim is now seeing patients at our Park Avenue clinic.

Yesterday Sachin and Adam released their Fortell documentary (I'll link in the comments). The response has been overwhelming! We are thrilled. Today they released Part 2, an uncut interview about our origins, why Joshua Kushner decided to invest, and my hope we'll see a broader out-flux of talent from finance and into high-tech, high-impact medical technologies. TLDR: honored as we are to have a high profile patient base, we believe everyone deserves awesome hearing aids and great audiologists - that's why we go to work! https://lnkd.in/gK2cfgDU thank you Sachin Shah, Adam Miller, my co-founders Andrew Casper, Igor Lovchinsky, Cole Morris, and the full team at Fortell!