00:33:12 · Matt
[00:33:12] S0: The way I think about it is there's five major hearing aid companies. It's something like $50,000,000,000 of market cap, and these five companies have been at it since like the seventies. And then you got your consumer electronics companies who make headphones and are adding kind of amplification features. So you have a pretty healthy, or I should say, somewhat crowded ecosystem of people trying to build products to help people hear better. The role that I want Fortell to play is advancing the state of the art, bringing and realizing more ambition for what a hearing aid can and should do for its wearer. So I care deeply about access and scale and touching as many people's lives as possible, but the role that I want our company to play in this ecosystem is taking the best in the world and making it better, so year after year after year, we will be advancing the state of the art, and so massive increases in access, massive increases in affordability, these are important goals. We need to pick our zone, and our zone is building the best possible medicine, the best possible solution, the best possible technology for people who have a hearing loss, and that I think is the only way we can be successful. If we try to do too much, we won't be able to do any of it well. What we want to be is an ultra small company focusing obsessively on one thing and just taking it all the way to the limits of what science and technology can achieve. Right now what that means is we have a premium product that's available in New York City, but very soon will be available in other cities and other parts of the world, and we're very excited about that expansion.
00:35:24 · Adam Miller
[00:35:24] S2: Yeah. I wish everybody could have the experience that I had standing out the front, us in the rain, trying the product and comparing it to the other one, But for those that can't have that experience, they'll care about the results and the data. So I'm keen to hear from you what have been the results you've seen from tests of this and then also the results you're getting from actual customers.
00:35:46 · Matt
[00:35:46] S0: -: Yep. So what I will say is we have filmed some videos that are on our website where the microphones we used for the video were our hearing aids. So even though we can't host everybody at our clinic in New York City and take them outside and put hearing aids in their ear, anybody on the internet actually can experience what we've built. Go to our website and you watch the videos. I assume people probably don't even believe it, but the demos are available and we actually... We did it in noisy places around New York City, Grand Central Station, Times Square, construction sites, restaurants. And so that authentic demonstration is available and I encourage your viewers to check it out if they're curious. But yeah, data validating the results of what we've built is a crucial part of the picture. We wanted to do something a little bit unusual within the hearing aid and hearing loss industry. We found these two professors at NYU. One is Doctor. Bill Shapiro, and he's in charge of the Cochlear Implant Center at NYU. And the other one is Doctor. Mario Svirsky, who's a professor of otolaryngology. These are kind of giants in the field of audiology. We ask them to help us devise a study comparing our hearing aid against the state of the art top of the line competitor in an environment that reflects the real world conditions in which people struggle today with hearing aids. And the goal is, let's do the first hearing aid study that is really at the level of academic rigor and quality that it would be embraced by the peer reviewed community. And so we've published the results of that study where we did a double blind randomized control trial against the top of the line hearing aid. And yeah, the data was, it's almost like too good to be true. My favorite statistic is that the odds of hearing words correctly in the most challenging environment were 19 times higher with our hearing aid than with the state of the art competitor.
00:38:22 · Sachin, Matt
[00:38:22] S1: That's crazy. [00:38:23] S0: And if we get more technical, we were able to meaningfully improve the listening ability that all of the participants had. So we were able to move for the first time in the industry something called SNR 50, which is a measure of what is the signal to noise ratio at which you hear 50% of the words correctly. We were able to take people with the control device from like an average SNR 50 of around three dB. So basically that means that the speech was, or the important speech was three dB louder than the distracting background speech. We were able to give them that same level of listening performance at a negative six dB approximately, so it's about a nine dB improvement in SNR 50. This... Like, we we've literally given people their listening ability in quiet, in noise, and, that's, I think, the job of a hearing aid. That's what it... That's why you go to the audiologist. Yeah? But no hearing aid had ever been able to meaningfully improve listening accuracy and comprehension in background noise. [00:39:35] S1: Matt, so tomorrow we're going Upstate to New York to see how the hearing aids are made, which I'm really excited about. But when you outline those crazy results, my mind immediately goes to what was the innovation that you guys had to create for the world to make this happen? If you could quickly tell us about the components that lead to these kinds of crazy results.
00:39:55 · Matt
[00:39:55] S0: Yeah, so at the core, the thing that's special about our hearing aid is we've been able to squeeze a very, very large AI into the signal path and then train that AI to separate sound into distinct channels on the basis of whether or not it's important or not. That means that we can give you much more loudness on the things that the AI thinks are important than the things that the AI has deemed unimportant. This has required development and innovation across the AI science side and also the compute side, because a hearing aid is such a tiny constrained device, and it needs to run all day on a tiny little battery. So the core to our differentiation and our success is this concept called co design, And, you know, I... I'm borrowing this word from from Jensen Huang at NVIDIA. It's remarkable what you can do when you lock in the same room the AI chip designers and the AI scientists. That allows them to work together and solve problems in an integrated fashion so that you can optimize the numerical system that your chip supports based on a knowledge of what works for this AI in this domain, and so on and so forth. So there's there's this incredible value of co design between the AI science and the AI custom chips that run the workload that the designers design. So I would say that's the big secret. That's the big... I guess not a secret anymore. That's the big unlock to our approach and it differentiates us from every hearing aid company in the world, big or small, is that we bid off the AI chip design and the AI science together and it helps that both teams are just full of the most brilliant people I know, including my co founders Andy and Igor, who you'll meet.
00:42:04 · Adam Miller
[00:42:04] S2: And you're currently launching the product out of a single clinic here in the Upper East Side. It's a beautiful clinic, but it is just one clinic. So what's the plan to be able to scale this, Fortell, to the masses?