Mimi and Knowles Team Up to Personalize Your Listening Experience

Hello, everyone, and welcome, to this week in hearing. An aspect of hearing care gaining increasing attention is streaming personalization. While hearing aids adjust live sound picked up by microphones, personalization does the same for streaming content. There are no regulations involved in personalization so that any headphone company can do it, and many are for some very good reasons.

We’ll get into though. Apple made big waves when they recently announced hearing aid functionality in AirPods Pro 2. For years, one could personalize the streaming sound in those AirPods if one first opened an app from a company called Mimi and took their hearing test. Now that Apple’s publicizing both personalization and hearing aid functionality, I expect that demand for personalized headphones will increase.

So it seemed a fitting time to invite Mimi on the podcast along with Knowles Corp. Leading provider of balanced armature receivers for hearing aids and true wireless earphones. Since the two companies just announced a partnership to combine their areas of expertise to make effective streaming personalization more widely available.

Knowles is also where I worked until leaving to form or futurity in 2022. So I’d like to welcome to the show Florian Schneidmodel, CEO of Mimi, and Meghul Kolchar, Senior Director of Business Development at Knowles. It’s great to have you both on. Florian. Uh, please tell everyone a little bit about yourself and your background.

Sure. And thanks for inviting me, Andrew. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Yeah.

I’m Florian, the CEO of Mimi Hearing Technologies. I’m with the company for more than four years now. I was, um, leading the product teams here at Mimi, and in summer last year I became CEO. I have a background in audio software and hardware, so worked for Native Instruments, a company creating products for music producers and DJs.

Um, also worked at Fraunhofer Institute on 3D sound reproduction, wave field synthesis. So audio is a big passion. Uh, uh, in my life. I’m also a music lover and, um, that’s very important to me. So that’s me in a few sentences.

Thank you. And Mehul, of course I know Mayhol, we work together at Knowles, but, uh, everybody else may not, so please tell us some more. Sure.

Thanks, Andy. Uh, thanks. And uh, thanks for inviting me here on the podcast. Uh, yeah, my name is Mehul, uh, Kocher. I’ve, uh, been with Knowles for about three years. Uh, I run what’s called the commercial team and Knowles, which is anything non hearing aids, using our balance amateur drivers focused on, on, um, tws and uh, Indian monitors.

Uh, and uh, a lot of my career has Been more focused on video, but I’m slightly new to audio but growing more and more used to enjoying where audio fits into this uh, world. But uh, yeah, great to be here.

Well thanks Paul Florian. Uh, maybe we should start with you reiterating how hearing personalization works and what makes it valuable.

Yeah, maybe allow me to take a step back and describe what we are doing here at Mimi Hearing Technologies. So we all know that hearing health is a massive and rising and untackled problem. Of course there is the hearing aid industry, uh, serving those with um, hearing loss. But um, as hearing loss is increasing and even um, getting worse, also for younger people based on the audio consumption that is increasing, particularly the pandemic accelerated this.

So around the clock audio consumption is the new normal. Um, so noise induced hearing loss is actually also a problem. There are billions of consumer electronics devices sold each year. Around 300 million true wireless earbuds each year. Um, but these devices are not really taking care of hearing health.

Um, and this is something that we want to change. So people would also not buy an 8K television and then not wear their glasses. Um, but this is what’s happening in audio. In audio, um, the user’s hearing uh, ability is not taken into account. So we enable everyone to hear better and healthier with the devices they use every day.

So what we want to do is we want to democratize access to hearing health. We want to give this into the hands of end users in their everyday life, not in, just in a medical sense. Um, so what we are offering is a, ah, precise hearing test. There’s also our free hearing test app that many people know.

Um, we’ve taken over 5 million hearing tests over the last year. So we have a massive database of hearing profiles. And uh, besides the precise hearing test that we offer on consumer devices, we also um, offer a personalized sound which is basically uh, tailoring the audio that you hear to your hearing ability.

It’s making the sound clearer, it’s increasing speech intelligibility. It’s basically restoring um, the lost details that you cannot hear anymore. It’s allowing you to hear as your ears were 10, 15 years younger. Um, maybe to quickly explain how this works from a user perspective because this might sound a little abstract.

So you buy a device with Mimi, a headphone for example. Then uh, you open the app that comes with the headphone, you do the hearing test and then um, the sound is tailored to your hearing ability. You don’t need an app or anything. It’s basically then um, running on the chip so it’s not um, requiring uh, you to open the app.

So what it does, technically it’s turning up the details and not the volume. So we’re not just making things louder. So the audio processing, um, is simulating how the healthy human ear works. It brings out details that you could not hear anymore. It brings these details above your listening threshold.

But it’s not an equalizer. That’s what, uh, many people, um, get wrong. They think, hey, sound personalization, okay, it’s a little bit of equalizing, uh, like you might know it from your old home stereo, but it’s not the same thing. An equalizer adjusts certain frequencies, highs, mids, lows, uh, statically.

You turn it once and then it stays like this. Um, but what we are doing is we are dynamically adjusting the sound, um, so that uh, we bring all these details above your listening threshold. The great thing is our tech really runs on all kinds of consumer electronics devices.

So that’s what we are trying to do, bringing hearing health features to everyone on the devices everyone uses every day.

Okay. And I want to explore that a little bit because people in the hearing world will be familiar with wide dynamic range compression, meaning when the sound is louder, you’re going to provide less gain and gain, and when the sound is quieter, you’re going to provide more. It sounds like you’re doing that to the streaming sound.

Is that correct?

Exactly. So the personalization that we offer the audio algorithm basically runs on streamed audio, that is music, um, first and foremost. But also of course a lot of people, um, are watching movies on their devices. Um, and it’s also um, very helpful with vocal, uh, or voice content like podcasts or um, voice calls.

If you’re doing a, ah, voice call or a call on WhatsApp or any other messenger service that is also uh, working. So exactly a situation that we are in right now is exactly that type of situation where um, our audio processing helps people. And the result is that um, you don’t turn, I said this before, you don’t turn up the volume so much.

But, uh, you hear more details, which means you don’t need to increase the volume. Most people, and we ran several studies about this, increase the volume because they don’t understand the details or when they are listening to a podcast, their surroundings may be too noisy, so they turn up the volume in order to hear the details.

Um, and with Mimi M, you turn up the uh, details but not the volume. So people are less likely to increase the volume on their device. And that’s a Good thing, because less, um, volume means less sound dose that you receive and that’s healthier listening. You can also observe this, um, when, for example, you are wearing a headphone and you’re in a video conference.

Most of us know the situation that, uh, you experience listening fatigue or after you are done with your two hour video conference, yeah, your ears don’t feel great, um, you feel like, okay, I need a break now. And with, um, sound personalization, this is less, uh, happening. You basically can listen for longer, uh, without having these effects because the sound dose receive is lower.

Now that makes perfect sense. And I’ve periodically quoted a study that actually shows on Internet meetings and the like, if you’re not hearing well, you also have a reduced ability to retain and engage with what your, what it is the meeting is all about. So you actually tests that show where you take a memory recall test, an audible recall test, you’ll recall less if you don’t hear well than if you recall more.

So the idea of personalization is, uh, very valuable in that context as well. I also look at it as being a, uh, positive reinforcer for hearing health in general. So take the Mimi hearing test. My music sounds better. I’ve seen my hearing through the test. I understand a little bit more about my hearing and I’ve been rewarded for, uh, paying some attention to my hearing by better music quality.

So I’ve liked it. As an introduction to hearing health in general.

Absolutely. That’s a big part of our mission. So, um, the first pillar for us is awareness. We want to raise the awareness for hearing health. Then we also want to compensate for any form of hearing loss as much as this is possible with consumer devices. And we also want to help people to protect their hearing.

So this is really uh the three things that we are doing. And maybe a side note, um, um on the awareness pillar there is a big campaign starting in the US Um about the hearing number. The hearing number is a simple metric that allows you to um, um, talk about uh, your hearing ability.

So it’s basically the average hearing loss, also known as the PTA 4, um, the Pure tone average if I’m not mistaken. So um, per year, um, so the DB hearing loss, um, average per year. And uh, you notice from other health areas like there is the body mass index that most people know.

It’s a simple metric that uh, can tell you uh, um about your weight and if you’re in a good range. And for hearing this doesn’t exist. Most people have no idea what it means. Um, but that’s important if you want to monitor it and eventually also um, do an intervention at an earlier step, not just when you are very old and have severe hearing loss.

What is happening to many people. Um, and we have partnered with the Johns Hopkins University who are leading this uh, campaign and actually today released. So the podcast will come out a little later but today released the uh Hearing number app on both Android and iOS. So this is a great thing for people to um, assess their hearing health and have a simple metric.

It’s a test that takes a few minutes. Um, and you will be um. Yeah we will get some recommendations what that means, what you can do with this number. Um, and yeah awareness for hearing health is important.

Excellent, excellent. I really like, I really like everything you said to bring awareness of hearing health and the importance of attending to your hearing health to the mass market. Now part of, part of this discussion is based on the recent press release in which you formed a partnership with Knowles, uh, so that together you could apply your areas of expertise into bringing hearing personalization and related hearing health issues more broadly.

What made Knowles an attractive partner?

Yeah, so um, Mimi, uh, audio processing compensates for hearing loss. Um and we observed that this is mostly occurring in the higher frequency range, at least for most of our users. We can see this from our data. Knowles is offering the so called balanced armature drivers, uh, which probably many of our listeners uh might uh be aware of um, which allow for more accurate sound reproduction and basically avoiding distortions of the original audio signal compared to yeah standard dynamical um, headphone drivers.

And uh, this basically means that this technology aims to recreate the original audio signal as intended by the artist when it’s about music or by the mixing engineers when it’s about A movie on a physical level. Right. So the headphone, the driver is trying to do the best job in recreating everything as accurately as possible.

What our contribution, or Mimi’s contribution is, um, it’s more on the perceptual perspective. So from a user perspective, how do you perceive the audio? And this is obviously then related to your hearing ability. And what we try is we try to correct for the hearing loss the user has and then um, yeah, this has an impact on how you perceive the audio signal.

So these technologies play nicely together. Together. It’s a dream team. Basically. You have the best possible reproduction on the physical level. And then you also make sure that your hearing ability is taken into account.

Okay, thanks.

A uh, couple of other uh, things that I could mention. Like a smaller form factor which is also very attractive, allows you to wear devices for longer period of time, um, fit uh, better into the ear and so on. Um, also they require less power, which is also important if you want to wear your headphones for a longer period of time.

Yeah. These are all reasons why, um, our mission for hearing health is nicely, um, playing together with the technology that Knowles is offering here.

Okay, thanks. Now Mehul Knowles has actually been working for some years in related areas studying the kind of sound profile that people prefer when listening to music with earbuds. I mean, tell me more about that.

Yeah, absolutely, Andy. I think you know, NOLS has been a leader in the hearing health industry, as you know, for years. Right. Obviously we are balanced. Amateur drivers are used in hearing aids for a lot of years. We were developer of the first balance armatures used there. Right. Um, but um, as we were looking at adjacent markets, um, uh, and more and more the audio industry started enabling ah, high res lossless audio for TWS devices.

Um, we started looking at that and R and D started looking at that as how can we help in that market? How can no be helpful uh, in the market and what could we do in the market? And we saw two things uh, that happened. Uh, one was that there was no optimal curve that existed, um, um, beyond 10 kilohertz.

And so um, Florian mentioned high frequency and uh, there. But there was no curve. People were mostly not tuning to it. There’s nothing available for it. Um, the second one curve didn’t work for everybody. Uh, and we just talk about hearing personalization. So what happened was our study, we invited people over and we did a test, uh, on what user preferences are, what is good music sound like.

That led uh, to what we call the Knowles preferred listening curve. Uh, and what that means was we saw two things that test came about. One, an optimal response beyond 10 kilohertz on the high frequency side was extremely important to fully enjoy music. Uh, and second, hearing, uh, personalization was a key part of uh, everybody enjoying music because everybody hears differently.

Um, we saw every age group of about 10 years. There was a 3dB improvement that uh, people wanted when we did that study. Uh, that study is available in the Audio Engineering Society, it’s peer reviewed. Um, and uh, we have now devices coming out tuned with a Knowles uh, listening curve as an option.

Okay. So my understanding is then as people got older and they started to see some age related hearing loss when you did these tests that people actually preferred the sound with some additional treble added, correct?

Exactly. So they wanted the additional treble added. Um, uh, and the way we did was we did a blind test, we offered them different levels uh, of treble, uh, and actually it really went well with their hearing capability. So the more treble was needed by the people who had hearing loss, more significant hearing loss.

And it uh, kind of went linearly to that. They preferred the treble. The Knowles curve uses the minimum what people wanted. But I think with the Mimi’s capability, uh, we could actually get them even more treble, uh, and we provide more capability to them.

Okay, yeah, I see how this, how the two companies work together because you’ve actually defined by peer reviewed study how much more trouble people prefer depending on their hearing loss level, which is something that Mimi can implement through their algorithm. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, we are the hardware to their software.

Why actually then explain a little bit more detail how an earphone that ideally uh, reproduces uh, hearing personalization and or the NOLS curve uses the NOLs, uh, balance armature receivers. Why not just do it with an ordinary speaker? What makes the Knowles component so valuable?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, uh, it’s like you know your home theater system just looking at it that way. Right. You have multiple speakers. When you look at a home theater you have a woofer and that focuses more on the low and mid frequencies and then you have a tweeters focus on high frequencies.

Our balance armatures, uh, do something very similar in the audio, uh, world, uh, on tws and uh, smaller devices. So your woofer has a great capability to up till certain frequencies and it can support that. But um, as you hearing loss, age related hearing loss, mostly on the high frequencies and uh, it’s beyond 10 kilohertz that you lose the hearing.

And so um, what we believe is a tweeter is required to have that capability back. So what we talk about in the marketplace is the hybrid design, uh, which where you combine a woofer and a tweeter, uh, to fully enjoy the music like uh, you would in a home theater atmosphere.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Uh, now Florian, the press release announced a partnership uh, between Knowles and Mimi that also included an implementation at a TWS earphone from a company called Briggs. Now clearly that was the starting point for the collaboration between the two companies. And what does the future look like?

Yeah, so uh, hopefully there’s ah, more products with uh, Knowles and Mimi on it. I know there are a couple of clients who have shown interest and that we are talking to. Probably can’t mention the names right now but um, yeah, I think that um, having a product in the market helps a lot.

So Brex is really, I uh, would say a showcase product because it’s of course a high end product. It’s also expensive but it’s uh, worth it I would say. Um, and also takes personalization to the next level because they not only have um, yeah, the NOLS technology and our audio processing in there but also for example custom molded earpieces.

Right. And things like this. So this is not an average, a true wireless earbud, um, that you buy ah, at Walmart. Um, so an amazing product. Um, but I hope that we will also bring this to more products um, so that more people also can. Can experience the combination of Knowles balanced armatures and uh, Mimi’s technology.

Um, besides obviously these products and these collaborations. I believe that, I mean and you said it in the beginning, um, hearing health is finally coming to the mainstream. So um, the latest with Apple’s announcement, uh, and the AirPods Pro 2 product in the market, this is now not a niche feature or a tier 2 feature or something that you might consider.

Apple has done this several times with their AirPods features. They introduced even the form factor, the design have become the industry standard. They are kind of the benchmark on true wireless earbuds. So um, this is changing now. So the market dynamics are changing. And of course we also have the over the counter hearing aid act and all these things and there’s a lot of things happening.

But if you for example read news from the consumer electronics shows, uh, this year, last year and two years ago, this was always happening, right? But it was only happening very slow, slowly. And I believe um, the slow growth in this whole area is now um, growing exponentially. And of course OTC hearing aids is one market segment.

But what I believe if we look a little bit more into the future is that a lot of these hearing health features and maybe even hearing aid functionality will come to consumer electronics devices. I’m not even talking about OTC devices which is anyways a category that’s only existing in the United States.

We are from Berlin, Germany. We don’t have over the counter hearing aids but we have consumer electronics headphones. And um, I believe that more of these um, headphones will have hearing health features in the future. From hearing tests to yeah, live conversation enhancement. I mean a couple of years ago um, earbuds didn’t have noise canceling.

Today it’s almost a standard in a certain price range. Um, after noise canceling there was the need for transparency modes or pass through modes. So most of these headphones by now also have pass through modes. Unfortunately often they don’t sound great, um, in particular when it comes to being in conversations.

So that’s the next thing that’s happening now. What Apple calls their hearing aid mode is something that will go into these um, pass through modes. Um, there are various kinds of technologies from beamforming to um, noise removal and so on. And this will happen and we are also considering this a uh, part of our hearing health offer.

So um, if you have time, visit um us at CES uh in 2025 in January and we have some exciting new things to show there. Um, yeah and there are also other technologies we for example will ah soon launch uh one product that also supports AuraCast with the latest Bluetooth standard which is also a new uh feature for um people with not only for people with hearing loss, for everyone actually.

Um and that’s I think the future of hearing health in consumer electronics devices. Um and we will see more of these products. And the cool thing is that we here at Mimi Hearing Technologies have been doing this for several years. We’ve um, we are now live on more than 40 headphones, 45 maybe by now and only this year we’ve launched 23 headphones.

So we accelerated our output uh tremendously and we are ready. Basically our technology is running on most of the common Bluetooth SoCs, um and most of the common DSPs that are built into these consumer devices. So the technical entry barrier so to say to bring hearing health to people through their consumer devices, through the everyday devices we have surpassed already.

And now we are ready to basically scale also and bring this to more people and more brands.

You know I totally agree with uh Andy. I totally agree with Florian. Um since the Apple announcement um like about a month or so ago now I visit a lot of TWS customers and the interest level in adding hearing health features as tremendously increased in the last month where everybody wants us to say how can Knowles help uh in this area?

And uh, the interest level already starts with the OEMs, starts with the, and then goes to the consumers. I think that that is a great uh thing that’s going to happen in the industry.

Yeah.

Just wanted to say that we often talked about a uh push versus pull from a consumer M perspective. So far it was a little bit more push. So if brands had interest in featuring sound personalization or hearing health features they could do that. And some brands have done this in the past even before Apple but this is now turning into a pull effect.

So end consumers are demanding these features. Qualcomm um for example publishes this uh report every year. State um of sound report. You can also read it in their last state of sound report that people are already considering um these uh features for example sound personalization when they buy a new device.

This is new. This didn’t two or three years ago this wasn’t happening. And uh, that’s a good thing because end users should be mindful about their hearing health, how to protect it and also how to uh, yeah inter uh do interventions early with everyday devices before they maybe need a more professional uh hearing aid.

And yeah that’s great and technology is here to help you and we are supporting this. That’s, that’s the.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean you saw ANC, right? I mean ANC, how it’s proliferated everywhere now it’s a 100TW. It started at really high end and I feel hearing personalization and hearing health features are coming. Users are banning it. Um, that’s a requirement and those features are coming. They want better audio, they want better listening capabilities from their headphones, all they wear.

There’s a lot of demand coming to these headphones and uh, hearing personalization is one of them for sure.

And yeah it’ll be interesting to see the coming CES uh because it might be a little bit too soon after the Apple announcement to see a lot of products in the market already. But Knowles is also going to be at ces. What audio related things are you showing there?

Great. Um, you know we have made tremendous progress uh ah Andy, on all the TWS devices uh, um so we’re going to have not only in our industry in our suite, um, uh at uh the Venetian we are not only going to have all the TWS products that we got released, uh we have done about seven product releases uh this year.

We’re going to show all of them um, in our suite uh um people can come and test them and hear them. But the other part of the business that I do is work with reference designs uh with a lot of our partners, uh odm, uh partners in China. So the other area that’s a tremendous growing market for Knowles uh is OWS open wearable stereo.

So we’re going to have some ODM partners uh release uh uh, uh ows uh headphones with us that we’re going to be demoing there. We’re going to have our multi way drivers that we recently announced uh on in ear monitors available there and they’re going to have some gaming related uh products that we’re going to show there.

So Knowles is going to have a breadth of uh products to show at uh CES this year, next year.

Okay, excellent. I know I’ll be checking both out for sure and anybody else listening here who’s uh going to ces. I think this, who’s interested in hearing health and how hearing health is coming to consumer devices. It would be well worth uh checking out uh both companies and what they’re showing.

So very much looking forward to that and probably even more so looking forward to CES in the coming year as now the new emphasis on hearing health rolls out and you see more and more products, consumer uh products with hearing health Features in it. So exciting stuff. Uh, Mehul, do you have any last thoughts before we wrap it up today?

Yeah, my last thoughts, uh, uh, are that I think Bragg’s and the product we released, uh, are a starting point. We believe there’s a very bright future for the relationship with Mimi, um, for us. Um, as Florian said, we are already looking forward to a few more devices releasing next with the combination.

And I think, um, um, uh, the future is bright. So we are looking forward to really working, uh, together where we need me here and bringing hearing health to all the products that are available in the market.

Okay.

And Florian, I second my whole statement. Absolutely. I think there’s a really bright future in the next months, um, and a few years for hearing health and consumer devices. And that’s a good message.

Well, to me it’s all very exciting. Just uh, when you think even back a few years ago, hearing health was kind of a fringe thing that you only thought about when your hearing got so bad you had to finally do something about it. And now all the attention and all the products being made available with hearing health features to the mass market I think bodes for a very bright future where people don’t wait so long to attend to their hearing and where people then address their hearing sooner and have a more enjoyable lifestyles, whether it’s Internet meetings, whether it’s audio consumption, whether it’s out live with their friends and family.

So this is all very exciting and I appreciate you both being on the show today. So thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the uh, dialogue, Florian. And thanks a lot for the invite. Uh, Andy, looking forward to.

Thanks, uh, for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us and looking forward to meeting in person in Vegas in January.

As am I. So yes, very welcome. Great to have you both on. And thanks to everybody for listening or watching this episode of this week in Hearing.