Can I Really Hear Better by Wearing These Eyeglasses?

Indeed, stigma is why some may choose to wear Apple’s $250 AirPods Pro 2, which last year received FDA clearance for its own OTC hearing aid feature. Since these and other popular wireless Bluetooth earbuds are commonly seen in public, the assumption from passersby is that people wearing them must be listening to music, podcasts or are on a call — not necessarily to hear better.

Others who don’t hear well may gravitate toward discreet hearing aids from such brands as Eargo, Jabra Enhance and Sony. Some nearly invisible hearing aids are concealed inside the ear canal.

An aid for hearing or to correct vision? Maybe both

Someone wearing Nuance glasses could be using them just for the audio benefits. But they also can serve the more conventional purpose of improving your vision if you swap in lenses according to your eye doctor’s prescription. The glasses come standard with light-responsive nonprescription lenses that darken to block ultraviolet rays in sunshine, then clear up in the shade.

You can turn the hearing functionality on or off by long pressing a tiny button under the right frame. Shorter presses cycle between volume levels or audio modes. 

Nuance Audio’s approach is novel, but Nuance isn’t the only company attempting to help hard-of-hearing people with eyeglasses.

Massachusetts start-up Xander has designed glasses that don’t have built-in hearing aids but, with speech-to-text technology, can project real-time captions inside the glasses. Aimed at people with more profound hearing loss, XanderGlasses cost around $5,000.

Another company TranscribeGlass, sells its own version of live captioning glasses for $377, plus a $20 per month subscription.

Getting used to them was easy

Wearing any hearing aid has an adjustment period. Since you aren’t sticking anything inside your ears or having anything stick out, donning Nuance glasses felt to me like putting on any average pair of glasses. I didn’t find them to be unbearably heavy. But your level of comfort may vary.

I don’t normally wear hearing aids, so sounds I don’t typically pay attention to — the pounding of keys on my laptop as I wrote this article and a few distracting noises when I fussed with the frames — are what I noticed most.

In general, the amplified sound helped my hearing. But my loss isn’t particularly profound, and I can’t report dramatic improvements.

I apparently have mild hearing loss in one ear. I discovered this in a hearing test on an iPhone, taken when I wore the previously mentioned AirPods as a hearing aid.

When wearing the Nuance glasses, I heard a little bit better in the Broadway theater, at events in my son’s high school auditorium and while dining in noisy restaurants. I found I didn’t need them to watch TV.

The accompanying app gives you options

You can calibrate the glasses through the app to adjust audio and help reduce acoustic feedback and the sound of your own voice. You also can:

• Customize the level of background noise.
• Choose a mode where you’re mainly hearing what’s in front of you rather than amplifying all that’s around you.
• Select among four general preset settings that are labeled A, B, C and D and tailored for certain situations. For example, one preset bolsters muffled or soft speech in a quiet environment. (Think of Kramer’s low-talking girlfriend on Seinfeld.) Another enhances higher frequencies, theoretically to make it easier to hear when multiple people are talking. Nuance can also use the microphone on your phone to measure environmental noise.

The company recommends experimenting with presets and volume levels. It is, um, sound advice: Trial and error helped me reduce distracting echo and whistling effects.

The glasses are not as ‘smart’ as you might think

The biggest omission, at least for some wearers, is that you can’t stream music or phone calls, as with some other OTC hearing aids or some smart glasses that are not hearing aids. Nuance says future versions will add health sensors, let you manage calls and perhaps add an integrated hearing test. No timing was given. 

Charge may not last all day. Battery life wasn’t a major issue for me. Because I have mild hearing loss, I didn’t feel a need to wear the glasses all day.

But the eight to 10 hours expected from a single charge might not be enough for everyone. The folded glasses, placed on a wireless charging pad, need about three hours to return to full power.

Three ways to monitor battery. You can check levels through the app, a small LED indicator or via an audio prompt when you first turn them on.

All smart glasses require a charge. But battery life isn’t something you ever had to think about with ordinary eyeglasses, so remember to turn the hearing function off when not in a situation where you need to hear what’s going on.