UNITRON DISCOVER NEXT
“Spectacular speech understanding” is just the beginning, according to the clever people behind the new chip and platform, designed and developed in Toronto, Canada.
Their new products are focused on providing great sound that enables superior speech understanding. However, conversations are known to be more complex than just speech. To achieve truly rich interactions, you need more than sounds and words — you need context and scenario.
Hearing products should move beyond the words to help people capture the deeper meaning in conversations. The unique sound technology, processed within the chip in the left aid and the right aid work in unison to help people understand the other factors associated with speech — exactly who is talking and where the voices originate from. Furthermore, both chips detect what kind of intonation people are using, and what their underlying emotions indicate. The hearing aids work in tandem to choose where best to focus in on the conversation.
Enhanced features also improve speech in noisy environments, especially in the presence of the softest-spoken people who may have previously been unintelligible.
Sound management labelled Soundcore by uniform allows feature-control to ease clients into particular life sounds, like traffic noise, dogs barking, children playing and loud music. It keeps getting better by making subtle adjustments over time.
Uniton’s Automatic Adaptation Manager feature breaks the wearer in gently by starting with a volume and transparency that sounds comfortable. Over the next few weeks, the hearing aids automatically transition to peak performance so that people can gradually and seamlessly adjust to their new sounds.
The particular unique engine inside Uniton’s Discover Next product helps people get to the heart of conversations. The SoundCore feature delivers more than just sounds, words, music and ambience. It delivers key nuances of speech and chosen environmental cues to provide a hearing experience that feels more realistic overall.
This system is powerful and intelligent, and integrated binaurally (both ears) to enable the wearer to overcome many aspects of their hearing loss and understand the deeper meaning in conversations. Sounds can be acoustically separated and perceived in their accurate locations when both aids can simultaneously process the information in stereo. This is thanks to the Spatial Awareness feature, which brings back natural localisation cues with an innovative four-microphone strategy (left/right/front/back) to accurately track sound.
Unitron are widely regarded as having the best environment classification in the business, which may not sound too important but it’s at the heart of what makes their Discover Next platform game-changing.
It’s a built-in intelligence that’s able to automatically identify environments through sound alone, as accurately as a 20-year-old. Bold claim! Simply put, if the hearing aids know exactly what environments you meander through over the course of a day, they will always be able to provide the ideal speech focus, regardless of the location.
Interestingly, you never hear them at work, attempting to figure out each setting and producing anomalies, such is the sophistication in how they decision-make, using enhanced machine-learning.
Unitron probably utilises the best Bluetooth connectivity in the industry, rivalled only by perhaps Phonak. You can connect them to any device you like that has Bluetooth. This is truly stunning, compared to anything that came before it.
You could own the very first mobile phone 15 years ago that had the first Bluetooth integration and Unitron Discover would connect to it. This is down to its wonderful four-point Bluetooth system. Maybe that’s partly why Unitron called the product Discover. No audio device is out of bounds — smart TVs, Roberts radios, iPods, stereos, you name it.
For calls and streaming content, you can just put the phone in your pocket, as you will get a hands-free experience. This is because the microphones in the Discover Moxi hearing aids pick up your voice.
Unitron have won industry awards for this. Their chargers are beautifully designed and are incredibly practical at the same time. You get 24 hours worth of charge from three hours of charging. You can even charge them from the case without it being plugged into a socket. This is quite an advantage when you want to pop away for a long weekend or something else, as the charger holds up to four charges within it, before needing to fill up with charge itself from a power lead.
The hearing aids switch off when you place them on charge and automatically come on when you take them out the next morning to wear — couldn’t be simpler.
If you like the idea of having the sound from your TV beamed into your ears, Unitron’s TV streamer will delight you. You effectively get your very own volume control via an app on your phone, or it’s simply done automatically. Either way, it’s something to behold. But if you have a smart TV, you can connect your Unitron Discover hearing aids directly to it via Bluetooth, therefore negating the need for an additional purchase.
Discover Next provides additional support, options and control. With the Remote Plus app, you can:
Receive helpful tips, advice and reminders on your smartphone about the aids
Make adjustments to bass, mid and treble frequencies that are captured in the TrueFit™ software with the equalizer, for self-learning
Adjust the balance between media and the environment
Submit ratings on your experiences, reported directly to the audiologist
Adjust volume, mute and unmute, and watch how-to videos
Lapel-worn microphone for one-to-one conversations in noisy environments — streaming speech directly to the hearing instruments.
Discreetly adjust volume and switch programs at your convenience