Key points
- Whisper uses AI to emphasize the voice of the person speaking to the wearer, CEO Andrew Song says.
- Hearing loss affects one in eight Americans, and Song argues subscriptions make expensive hearing aids more affordable.
- Sequoia Capital led Whisper's seed and Series A rounds, and Song says the global market is worth tens of billions.
Whisper bets AI can fix the hearing aid people abandon
Whisper is rebuilding the hearing aid around AI. Hearing loss is private, and the devices people are given often end up in a drawer, as Andrew Song's grandfather's did, because they amplify everything rather than the voice in front of the wearer. What the technology could do is far beyond any product today, and that gap is where Song sees Whisper's place.
Takeaways
- AI emphasizes the voice speaking to the wearer. Hearing aids amplify more than a normal-hearing person would want, so the system has to understand what to emphasize. Whisper has about 55 employees, and hearing loss affects roughly one in eight people in the US.
- Grandfather's unused hearing aids sparked Whisper. Song's grandfather in China was given hearing aids by a doctor and chose not to wear them. Song only found out when he opened a drawer in his home, tried the pair himself and was shocked at how bad they were.
- A subscription can make hearing aids affordable. Hearing aids are expensive in the US, and Song argues a subscription model brings them within reach for more people. Sequoia led the seed and Series A rounds, and Whisper had to teach investors about a market worth tens of billions globally.
- Fast beats right when you cannot be right. Song says being right is very hard, so you might as well move fast and find out if you are wrong. He treats each step as neither reliably forward nor backward, allowing for false successes and false failures.
- Know your truth, whatever your role. Song's lesson from his grandfather, who died a few months before the recording, is that a CEO or a product manager needs a clear truth about the work because it guides every decision.
Song's path to Whisper
- He read Bill Gates's The Road Ahead as a child and thought it sounded like science fiction.
- At the University of Waterloo he studied computer science and mathematics, and the co-op programme gave him six work terms he wanted to spend building products.
- A friend at Facebook told him to apply as a product manager. He thought he interviewed terribly, but Facebook hired him anyway, reasoning he could work as an engineer if it went badly. He started on Messenger.
Building the first hearing aid
- Whisper went through about 10 or 20 minimum viable products, starting with laptops and big handheld microphones. A manufacturing partner's microphones did not work.
- Devices later stopped working for users who showered and came back to wear them, around the fifteenth hill Song counts on the way. The longer a hardware problem goes unsolved, the more you believe the company dies without it.