Nuance Hearing Voice Selector Review – An Affordable Hearing Aid Alternative If You Have Difficulty Hearing Others in Loud Environments

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The Nuance Hearing Voice Picker is a new device designed to alleviate auditory distractions and background noise.

It’s specifically aimed at those battling cocktail party problems overcoming challenging hearing situations, offering a technological solution to understanding conversations in crowded rooms without the need for hearing aids.

A survey by Opinium on behalf of the Nuance hearing found that 41% of UK adults admitted to having a “cocktail party problem”, having difficulty understanding speech in a loud environment. More than a third (36%) said that a noisy environment caused them stress and anxiety, and 60% of people with hearing problems said they would be open to trying technology to help them hear in a busy environment.

Features – what is it?

The Nuance Hearing Voice Selector is a disc-shaped hearing aid that you can place on a table and pair with special low-latency headphones. Then, the device has 8 built-in microphones that pick up ambient sounds and sounds.

The Voice Selector Converse has a unique auto-steering technology that picks up the dominant speaker even as they move around. Alternatively, users can manually switch between speakers while talking to the group.

It also captures, processes and plays audio at a record speed of 6 milliseconds (0.006 seconds). It’s a versatile device that can be used as a desktop mic or a remote mic – ideal for most scenarios where background noise can be a problem.

The remote mic works by putting the hard-of-hearing person on the headset, and then having the second person wear the Nuance around their neck. This can be handy for use in the car or outdoors with your partner.

my situation

When I first got my hands on this device, it sounded amazing. I ran into the problem it was designed to solve. My right cochlea is partially damaged. My hearing is usually fine in quiet environments, but it deteriorates rapidly as the noise increases and I have a hard time hearing what people are saying. Background noise of any kind makes it increasingly difficult for me to hear what people are saying.

I’m usually fine with a group of people at home, so the cocktail party question might not be the best description of my problem, but a bar or anywhere with music playing or lots of people talking is a problem.

In theory, I’d love to use it in a bar, but in the end, I found the overall design and performance to be unsuitable for this environment. It also did not advertise the situation.

Settings/Apps

Nuance has a companion app that doesn’t really do much, so you don’t need to use it very often. The only thing I found helpful was the listening test feature, which did seem to improve a lot after that. As you can see from my hearing profile, my hearing problems are mostly in my right ear.

Paired headphones, including third-party headphones – aptX LL restrictions

Nuance comes with some low-latency neckband headphones. I don’t know why they thought it was a good idea to use neckband headphones, looking at their own promotional photos, it looks silly to wear them in social situations.

Unfortunately, these use aptX Low Latency, which is now an outdated Bluetooth codec that has been superseded by aptX Adaptive.

There are a handful of in-ears that use aptX LL, but the only in-ear I know you can buy with this codec is the EPOS GTW 270. They are excellent earbuds, but annoyingly, I seem to have misplaced mine.

The Nuance can be paired with any Bluetooth earbuds, and I tried them on the Cambridge Audio Melomania 1 Plus. These audios sound good, and passive noise isolation helps improve overall performance. Unfortunately, there is a noticeable delay between the speaker and the earbuds.

Pairing earbuds is very easy. To keep the Nuance outside the case, you’ll need help pressing a small Bluetooth button. The light will start blinking and it will be in pairing mode. Then put your earbuds into pairing mode (usually you just leave them powered on while they are on) and they should pair automatically.

There’s also some noticeable lag with the included headphones. Or at least a little bit of an echo, you can still hear the person talking, but the headset will also repeat that sound.

is using

I had mixed results when testing. It does work as advertised, but it’s not a magic fix for hard-to-hear background noise. My initial impressions were poor, but the more I used it, the more I found it useful in more scenarios.

After I went through the listening test portion of the setup, I found that the included headphones performed significantly better

Nuance is essentially just a disk with 8 microphones. Each microphone can detect if the sound is coming from that direction and then change the pickup to that direction.

In theory, it would recognize a sound and amplify it. You can also disable specific microphones to manually control the directionality of the device.

While it does manage to achieve those goals, overall performance is a bit of a mixed bag.

The quality of the microphone itself seems to be low, so the amplified sound sounds tinny. This may be a design decision that allows it to separate vocals from other ambient sounds, but it won’t produce the best sound quality.

It also didn’t magically recognize sounds as I would have liked. It still picks up a ton of other sounds, while it does effectively amplify what you end up with with very little sound.

When we tested this in my mother’s kitchen, we gathered around her table, and the performance wasn’t good at all. All the hard surfaces in the kitchen end up causing Nuance to amplify a lot of unwanted high-pitched noise in the kitchen. Everything just sounds more echoic.

Tested with music playing from my speakers in a more controlled environment in my office. The performance is quite good. The headphones’ passive noise isolation lowered the volume of the music, while the microphone picked up my voice. Further turn off the microphone for speaker-oriented improved performance.

Continuing to use it in other environments found it to be fine in some cases but less than ideal in others. I often have to rely on manual mic selection for best results.

In my experience it works best when I don’t think I will have hearing difficulties in the first place. So, I don’t think as far as I’m concerned, my hearing isn’t good enough to take full advantage of this technology.

Strangely, I get different results in wired and wireless mode. For wired headphones, these suffer from more low-quality tinny audio than Bluetooth. I suspect the 3.5mm port DAC is pretty bad.

Price and Alternatives

At £399, the Nuance Hearing Voice Selector seems like a lot of money for what you’re getting.

However, I don’t know of any direct competitors, and I think the best alternatives are hearing aids, which can easily cost upwards of £1500.

comprehensive

I had high hopes for the Nuance Hearing Voice Selector, thinking it could alleviate the frustration of not being able to hear people in noisy environments. I think my unrealistic expectations of being able to use it in a busy social setting meant I was a little disappointed with the overall performance at first.

Once I got it all set up and used it for a while, I did start to appreciate the benefits of using it, of course if you have more severe hearing loss.

It’s also significantly less expensive than a proper hearing aid, which is well worth trying as an affordable alternative if your hearing is poor enough that you might need one.

There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, so it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re having issues it’s designed to fix.

I love the idea behind this technology and I think it has huge potential to be useful to a wider audience.