MacVoices #21018: CES - Noopl Adds Direction Hearing Aid Capabilities to AirPods Pro

[Music] this edition of mac voices is supported by amazon pharmacy get your prescriptions delivered right to your door find out more at amazon.com mac voices rx this edition of mac voices is supported by headspace meditation made simple visit headspace.com voices for a free one month trial welcome to mac voices this is the talk of the apple community and i'm chuck joyner folks this is another one of those ces interviews that usually would take place in person in las vegas we couldn't do that this year unfortunately but that doesn't mean we didn't find some very interesting products and people to talk to and i want to introduce you to tim trine he is the ceo of neuple this is one of those devices that i feel like deserves his explanation rather than mine because he knows it so much better and i found it very interesting and very exciting so tim with that i'm going to welcome you to mac voices and uh let you explain what uh nupo is great now i appreciate being here and thank you for the invitation um so neupo is uh is a product and a company uh so nupol 1.0 is our our first product and and the company was really designed to solve some very interesting and uh the challenging technical problems all about providing clarity in our lives so our first product is uh as i said nupal 1.0 and it's a little made for iphone accessory that i'm showing you here if i can hold my hand still um and it's a a multi-multi-microphone array that provides a really dramatic improvement in signal to noise ratio what does that mean that means in a crowded environment uh a noisy environment we're able to provide a really substantial improvement in people's ability to understand speech and noise um and so that's you know that that's our first product and and all of our products that we envision uh build on this platform which allows us to uh really provide clarity in a challenge in challenging environments you think about it in the context of the pandemic and the fact that we're not able to get out into credit environments we've had you know had a new uh manifestation of communication challenges and that's masked speech right so even those masked speech situations in medical situations even at the grocery store and we're all a little bit more challenged in our ability to communicate and you know this little accessory is something that should help out in those environments as well so when we chatted during ces you showed me how this worked and especially how it works with a pair of airpod pros like i'm wearing right now and i think you are as well so the idea hearing aids or assisted hearing assistance is not new to the iphone but what you do with it is i i feel because i haven't seen anything like it before the idea that it can be directional and that you can control it without having to even touch your iphone right i mean in fact the you know the genesis of me joining nupol uh a year ago right was really predicated on what i saw as a lot of convergence and and the launch of the airpod pro kind of just pushed me over that final edge so airpod pros were launched a little bit over a year ago and one of the things that the airpod pro did which is very very difficult to do is manage you know where that people can you know you can use an airpod pro for more than just music listening more than just uh listening to uh podcasts and that is the transparency mode so the ability for these little devices to now function as an assistive device through a really excellent execution on transparency mode which is a very hard acoustic problem to solve really kind of was the impetus for me looking at this as the perfect convergence of technology finally being mature enough to allow us to do some really novel things directional processing in general is not a new concept but allowing that really refined directional processing combined with the ability to steer the device in a very natural way it was really what is the game changer aspect of this and i can quickly demo that if you'd like um please yeah it's i while you're setting that up i i think that i i don't think a lot of us have thought a lot about spatial audio and what it means i think we believe uh or up to this point have thought of it as well it's a cool thing that uh that that apple and and the uh the video manufacturers are able to build in so that you know i i can get that experience but having it go the other way and actually work for me is i think a new concept exactly and i mean that was the you know that was a little bit of serendipity on our part because uh you know when we saw that ios 14 was going to include uh spatial audio that you know what goes into spatial audio is about the knowing the position of the head and body relative to to the screen uh and so it was you know we weren't sure what they would unveil in terms of api calls that we you know others could actually use and so it was a you know a lot of delight that came with that was because it just it worked out of the box and so if i show you my screen right now i've launched of course i've got a window open and a little bit of glare there let me hold it on this side so that's our that's our interface and as you see it's it's quite simple so when you plug plug the device in it'll automatically default to automatic mode and then notice that as i'm slightly turning my head back and forth you begin to see that user interface turn back and forth that's head steering coming from i'm only wearing a single ipod right now you can wear one or two ipods and now as i turn my head more dramatically you see that that's the visual representation of us steering this microphone array that's down here so we have three mems microphones uh separated by about 12 millimeters in this triangular orientation uh and that allows us to get uh super directivity which you know it's it's hard to for people have heard about directional processing seen it in hearing aids in in most in most ear level devices has some level of directional processing just to be able to pick up your own voice more easily but the magnitude of the directional processing that we're doing here is an order of magnitude a couple orders of magnitude greater than that so we're able to provide about a 15 db improvement in the signals and noise ratio you contrast that with traditional directional processing that you get in a hearing aid and that's only three or four db uh so it's it's quite dramatic as you heard in the demo uh in the audio demo somewhere in here there's a joke about improving signal to noise in our lives today but that's we'll leave that alone um so unless you're a contortionist you're probably going to be able to go about 180 degrees from side to side um if i if i'm placing i don't know how if i take my iphone and and just with your device and put it here and then i turn my head that much i'm probably killing my mic but if i turn my head that much how how effective is the microphone on your device at picking up something that is is that far that way or that far that way oh it's excellent so it's we have 360 degrees steering so part of the you know couple things and the in the nuances of how we've executed this one is that in the as i'm holding the device our system recognizes that the device is in my hand right just from the accelerometer data so it has a different set of filter coefficients that are optimized for handheld use uh when i set it down on the table it switches instantly to a tabletop set of filter coefficients that are optimized for the reflections that you get off of off of a table so we're maintaining that excellent directionality uh in and and we can steer it with high precision in 360 degrees so if i switch to the manual mode for example now let's let's say you're at a uh at a restaurant with your spouse uh and you happen to be sitting next to each other uh and rather than having to turn your head like this every time you want to communicate you simply you know steer the you know the array to where you want to hear and carry on with your life um and uh and then of course if you're you know let's say that that beam you know you want to actually hear a couple people that are coming from the right hand side of the table and we can you know widen that beam a little bit further uh sorry for the reflection um and then of course um if the if it's not too noisy of environment or in a situation where you really just want to hear everything around you then you can go into that omnidirectional mode and you're still taking advantage of a little boost in the gain and the sensitivity that comes from having a remote microphone so even in omnidirectional mode you get a slight advantage over the you know open air condition yeah yeah it does and so i can i can use the steering to make it automatic with my head turn or i can select an area that i want the microphone to focus on correct correct today's mac voices is supported by headspace meditation made simple i don't know if you need to hear 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typically i've adopted the made for uh made for iphone made for ios implementation because it provides a relatively low latency link between the phone and the hearing aids so as a front end to any made for iphone hearing aid this also functions you just we just haven't integrated with hearing aid companies uh devices yet to offer that auto steering uh but that's certainly a possibility in the future so now for now you'd have to manually steer that device but the advantage is still is immense at this price point and that's the other thing that is uh the novel about our approach you know the purpose of you know creating the company was really about creating accessibility for all so we're at a less than 200 price point uh our list price is 199 if people sign up before we actually go live with our launch in a few weeks um we're offering it at 149 you know you contrast that with the average cost of a pair of hearing aids which is close to four thousand dollars and can run up to eight thousand dollars uh it's you know quite a dramatic change well the fact that i probably already have a pair of airpods or well in this case airpods pro we have to have airpods pro to use these but i have have just making more use of this device that i already have absolutely and i think that they're i mean that's one of the premises of our uh you know choosing this platform to go to market with first right is that you know apple's apple's won the wireless uh headset war so far um and uh and as i said they've done a remarkable job with the airpod pro so why not leverage uh what a lot of people already have i know somebody's gonna email one or both of us and ask so i will just go ahead and do it if you're sitting here or sitting looking at me the way you are and you take your device and and turn it can you listen to with some with some enhancement someone directly behind you sure of course and i think that's uh you know so you know spot you know as an eavesdropping device it's not our not our intent but uh it certainly is effective i think one of the things that we'll we'll learn as we launch the product right is just you know where do people find this the most useful one use case that i think is probably handy is road noise in a car right so setting setting the device on the center console of your vehicle and aiming it towards the rear seat if you've got passengers in the back seat that you want to converse with and still maintaining safety by only having this in one ear might allow you to have a carry on a safe conversation with people in the back seat is that an important use case i don't know but it's it's a real one and an effective one i think it's just a matter of us all realizing how effective this can be and figuring out those use cases sometimes they're the obvious ones pop up and sometimes it takes people that are really using it in a day-to-day situation um but i can definitely see you know lots of loss of uses the restaurant it was a was a great example of one for folks who are having or a little bit hearing challenge but not too much at this point um that a device like this as opposed to a dedicated hearing aid and you know even even a dedicated hearing aid sometimes can create more problems i've i've had that experience with family members where hearing aids are great except that they bring up everything and sure they can be tuned but they are not directional right yeah the directionality of most hearing aids provide is really to compensate for the fact that you know the vast majority of hearing aids sold today are the behind the ear style because they've gotten so small and they need that bluetooth integration um the problem is that the having the microphones above your ear you lose all the directional advantage of this pinna of the physical ear outer ear which provides about a three db advantage uh in directivity now and so that's what that those directional microphones are primarily doing is you know compensating for what you've taken away by filling filling the ear with something um so it's a this takes it much much further um and i i think that's where the the demo is kind of the the penultimate understanding uh of of how this plays out um and i you know i don't i can share that now or um or i'm not sure if this is a pre-recorded video if you want to include that i'm going to simulate a restaurant situation with a single talker across the table and background noise filling this space with five by five loudspeakers in the distance two on my right and three on my left so in a second i'm going to switch to automatic mode as i said turn on the background noise look to the speaker across turn my head this way and turn my head back and hopefully you'll be impressed by the amount of processing that we can do with this very small device nice to see you all again but dave i just have to know are you going to do the merger [Music] nice to see you all again but dave i just have to know are you going to do the merger i think that was one of the things i said to you when we met it's like yeah i'd love to talk about this but someone really needs to see it just the short demo you did with with understanding how it's steering and the implications of that i think are somewhat staggering versus versus a traditional hearing aid yeah yeah it's difficult to communicate without hearing that difference right and hearing uh so that's that's one of those things that uh you know hearing is believing in this case so i i plugged this into my iphone obviously via the lightning port um is it pulling the juice from the iphone or is there a separate battery or charging for the device no it's pulling it's pulling uh pulling current from over the lightning port um that's one of the things that for which i'm most proud is that the current consumption is extremely low right for a 4a an accessory like this apple allows you to without having a pass-through of a you know to charge simultaneously you have to be under 100 milliamps of current consumption we're under 30 milliamps of current consumption if you look at that in the context of the milliamp hours of a typical iphone battery that's less than one percent so we think people won't even notice the the impact of uh of battery life so it's literally less than one percent of the typical iphone battery so it's not going to appreciably affect the the usability of my iphone if i even if i'm using this as you said on a cross-country drive right and it's i mean it's we're we're very proud of that fact um now it's a it was a nice a nice execution of of the platform so you mentioned the price point but i'll get you to repeat that but what when do you launch when do these become available for folks so we've got our first 300 systems coming in within the next few weeks we'll be doing some initial you know beta trials uh so the timing is a little bit fuzzy but it's in february where it'll become available with uh more quantities um and then uh and so it's uh priced at 199 but as i mentioned if people go to our website today and and pre-register give us their email address we'll honor a price of 149 at that initial launch one question i ask i think most people at ces where does your company name come from because you say see some very unusual names and nupo is definitely an unusual name yeah hopefully one that becomes uh you know you know the penultimate um goal of any company is as your as your name becomes a verb right and uh so you you you know you start newpling um but the uh the original name is actually a mashup of new places and it was a previous incarnation of the vision of the founders the two co-founders of the company who are working on an app related to you know encouraging people to to go to new restaurants uh so that whole restaurant use case is kind of deep in our in the core of our dna uh but it was now that's the the simple answer was a mashup of new places and uh we've you know when we uh kicked off the new focus of the company we we liked it and decided to keep it around yeah i like it it's and it makes perfect sense once you understand the history of the company and at least one of the primary use cases so i like it uh last question then the obvious one where do folks go to uh to pre-order and to learn more uh that's really simple uh newpol.com great well hopefully this will be the start of us turning newpo into a verb yeah i appreciate that and uh and we uh we certainly hope so i look forward to to uh continuing on this journey and and getting this out to market and seeing what people have to say great tim thank you so much for the time really appreciate it hope you had a good ces and i hope maybe we get to see each other in person next year in vegas likewise appreciate it chuck folks i'm chuck joyner this is mac voices go check this out this has to be one of the coolest things that i saw at ces obviously it's not going to be necessary for everybody but it's a great demonstration of what the technology can do and how it's advancing things that affect potentially all of us whether it's us or or a member of our families until the next time and as always thanks for watching visit macvoices.com for show notes and to connect with chuck on social media get involved in our facebook group or like our facebook page and get more out of your apple tech with mac voices magazine free on flipboard and on the web and if you find value in it all consider supporting us through either our patreon campaign at patreon.com voices or by making a one-time donation via the paypal link on our front page and in the show notes of each episode you will join these fine people who help bring you mac voices advertising handler by backbeat media backbeatmedia.com bandwidth provided by cashfly cashfly.com

Channel: MacVoicesTV

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Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021