Contribute to the Future of Hearable Tech With Sonarworks

Hearable tech is one of the most interesting burgeoning trends over the last few years, ranging from wearable in-ear language translators to Sgnal’s fingertip phone calls to Horus, a machine learning-powered device that provides a verbal account of the world around for the hearing impaired. Last year, I rated Australian startup Nuheara's IQBuds, wearable ear pods that allow you to hear what you want to hear in the world around you as one of my top IoT consumer tech of 2018. Hearable tech is growing in both hardware, popularity, and precision in both consumer and commercial offerings. 

The reality is that a lot of us have some form of hearing loss, but you're yet to getting around to any medical treatment. Perhaps, you struggle with background noise, hearing people clearly in group conversations or in a meeting. What if you could get both active noise cancellation and the ability to approve your hearing through a set of ear pods?  While medical innovations such as cochlear implants have been around since the 1980s, where people would have to visit an audiologist to get their hearing checked and treated, today's audio tech brings the opportunity of personalization to consumer tech, creating a blur between medicals and wearables. 

However, precision metrics require a decent amount of data to provide accurate results for everyone. Hearable tech startup Sonarworks from Riga, Lativa, recently launched a public research project designed to fine-tune the calibration of their award-winning apps for individual listener preference. The Sound Preference Research Project is a global effort to improve audible tech and allows users to audition music samples with different sound settings in a simple A/B assessment to choose the sound they prefer most. Based on the user input AI algorithm predicts the best possible sound settings for that user.

“By deploying this project, we are able to gain a better understanding of sound preference trends that are happening across our vast user base, with the goal of delivering the ultimate sound for each individual on any device,” explains Helmuts Bems, Sonarworks CEO and Co-Founder.

“Everyone’s listening experience is inherently personal. So by feeding AI the results from this project we are able to ascertain objective insight into how people perceive sound. This means we can arrive at a user’s preference more quickly based on how they respond.”

Once the project is complete and its results are fully integrated into True-Fi, it will be possible for users to then tailor sound to their own listening preferences.

The Sound Preference Research Project is the latest in a series of outreach efforts that Sonarworks has made to its growing user community, a dialogue that has allowed the company to integrate user feedback into upcoming projects. “We have established a solid foundation for delivering Studio Reference sound across many different audio devices,” Bems says. “The next step in this process is to create a seamless platform for users to discover and define their own ‘Ultimate Sound’.

Furthering its mission to provide ‘Ultimate Sound’ for consumers, Sonarworks will soon be extending its Studio Reference technology into a range of new applications, including the residential and automobile markets.

In January during CES 2019, the company unveiled the Sonarworks True-Fimobile app, providing audio calibration references on both iOS and Android for 300 headphone models. Currently launched in preview mode, the app will be available for purchase later this year in the App Store and Google Play for $3.99 USD per month, or as a lifetime license for $99 USD. The company will be announcing new OEM integration as well as a new software offering aimed at the wider consumer market towards the end of 2019.

The Research Project is currently open to all, with integration into Sonarworks’ True-Fi mobile app planned for the end of Q2, 2019. To take the Sonarworks preference test visit: https://preference-research.sonarworks.com