Future Ear Radio

Guests: Gyl Kasewurm (Professional Hearing Centers - MI), Meagan Lewis (Wake Forest Baptist Health -NC), Ronnie Boling (Brentwood Hearing Center - TN),  Sheryl Figliano (Centers for Hearing Care - OH), Judy Huch (Oro Valley Audiology - AZ), and Jason Aird (Iowa Audiology & Hearing Centers - IA)

Topic: Life for Private Practice Owners and Audiologists from March-June 2020

Dave interviews six audiologists and business owners across the hearing care industry to discuss what life has been like in each of their business settings during the pandemic. 

The goal of this conversation is to understand how their businesses have been impacted, what the shutdown has been like in different parts of the country, how they have adapted to these challenges, and ultimately what their practices look like as businesses begin to reopen from lockdown.

Guests: Shari Eberts - Hearing Health Advocate, HLAA Board Member, & Founder of LivingWithHearingLoss.com; Matt Hay - Hearing Health Advocate & Director of Audiology Sales at Redux 

Topic: Life with Hearing Loss during a Pandemic 

Shari and Matt join Dave to walk through their individual journeys from when they first discovered they had hearing loss to becoming advocates and champions for hearing health. 

Each share their perspectives on the challenges folks with hearing loss face as masks and zoom calls become normalized, and ways that we as a society can better accommodate for our large population of people with hearing loss. 

In addition, the three chat about technology and ways that it has proved beneficial for the hearing loss community. 

*Show Notes*

Matt's NPR/KQED Story: https://www.kqed.org/news/11383461/soundtrack-of-silence

Guests: Andy Bellavia (Knowles Corp), Chris Economos (PhysIQ), Ryan Kraudel (Valencell)

Topic: Building Early Detection Systems with our Wearable Devices to Combat Public Health Crises

Dave hosts a panel comprising of Andy, Chris and Ryan to explore the idea of how wearable & biosensor technology can be used to help combat public health crises by serving as early detection systems for irregularities found in individual health data sets. The four talk through today's sensor capabilities, clinical trials that have been conducted to highlight the validity, and how machine learning & deep learning are allowing for more sophisticated measurements & assessments of a wide variety of metrics. 

Our wearables are quickly progressing to the point where they can serve as true guardians of health.

Guest: Kyle Acker, SVP at RiseENT

Topic: The Appreciating Value of Today's Hearings Aids 

Kyle joins Dave to share his professional journey that led him to RiseENT after spending ten years at Starkey Hearing Technologies. From there, the two discuss how the industry can adapt to the various disruptive forces that it's facing. Finally, the two dive into today's hearing aid technology, and speak to the ways in which the hearing aid value proposition is evolving and how providers can best leverage all this new found value.

Guests: Jeff Adams, CEO & Founder of Cobalt Speech and Language 

Topic: Building Alexa and What Comes Next for Conversational AI

Jeff Adams joins Dave for this episode of the podcast, walking Dave through the major hurdles that Jeff's team at Amazon had to solve when they were tasked with bringing Alexa to life. Jeff founded the Alexa Speech Group and led a team of speech & language scientists from 2011 - 2014 at Amazon building the automatic speech recognition (ASR) system and natural-language understanding (NLU) engine that Alexa runs on. 

Jeff provides insight into how his team solved wake word detection, ASR, NLU, and text-to-speech synthesis, and then shares what's on the horizon for conversational AI more broadly. 

Guests: Imrich Valach, Co-founder & CEO of Sentien 

Topic: Sentien Audio: All Day Bone-Conduction Hearable 

Dave sits down with Imrich Valach to discuss the novel and creative approach his team is taking to the whole premise of a hearable, with its all-day, bone-conduction audio device. During this interview, Imrich and Dave chat about the inspiration behind starting the company, why he ultimately settled on bone conduction for the form factor, and how the device can serve as a conduit to the audio web and voice user interface.

Guests: Nikolaj Hviid, CEO of Bragi, and Andy Bellavia, Director of Market Development at Knowles Corp

Topic: BragiOS: The Intelligent Hub Connecting a World Full of Sensors

Andy and Dave sit down with Nikolaj Hviid, the CEO of Bragi, to learn the full story of Bragi - how it started, the "proof of concept" hardware phase, and the current phase with BragiOS. Last year, Bragi sold off its hardware business to get back to its roots as a software-based company and shifted the whole company's focus on BragiOS. 

Throughout the conversation, Nikolaj shares the vision of BragiOS and compares it to a sort of "hive-mind" of sensors that are operating as a collective group to gather insights. As Nikolaj mentions, sensors are increasingly becoming smaller and cheaper, allowing for broader proliferation. What BragiOS intends to do is connect and unify those sensors together within BragiOS so that all the various sensors can communicate amongst each other, to identify specific insights based on the aggregate of what's being sensed. 

This was one of the most insightful and futuristic episodes yet. Enjoy!

Guests: D'Anne Rudden, Owner of Longmont Hearing & Tinnitus, and Brian Urban, President and Co-Founder of CounselEAR

Topic: TeleHealth in the Audiology Setting

Audiologists D'Anne Rudden and Brian Urban join Dave to talk about how TeleHealth is being implemented and adopted within the audiology setting. As a private practice owner, D'Anne shares her own experience of adopting TeleHealth in her practice, while Brian shares how CounselEAR's TeleHealth feature has been adopted by various hearing care professionals and practices around the country. The conversation delves into the perceptions and attitudes toward TeleHealth before the pandemic, how it's viewed today, and then how they each see TeleHealth's role in the audiology setting as we move beyond the pandemic and into the future. 

Guest: Ian Freed, CEO of Bamboo Learning

Topic: 5 Reasons Why Bamboo Learning Fascinates Me

Hello and welcome back to Future Ear. The next episode of podcast features Ian Freed, CEO of Bamboo Learning.

Throughout this conversation, Dave highlights five reasons why he believes Bamboo Learning is one of the "must watch" companies within the voice industry. Through a combination of deep domain knowledge (Ian led the Alexa team at Amazon when Alexa debuted) and subject matter expertise (co-founder Irina Fine's background in education), the two have fused their knowledge together to create an educational offering built specifically for Alexa devices. 

Ian believes Alexa is a computing platform in its own right, and therefore thinks that there's far more potential with the types of experiences that can built for Alexa speakers and multi-modal devices, which is what he and Irina are aiming to prove with Bamboo. 

Guest: Keri Roberts, Brand and Content Strategist and Host of the Inside VOICE podcast

Topic: Takeaways from 100+ Voice Technology Podcast Interviews

Keri joins Dave to discuss some of her biggest takeaways from the first 100 episodes of the podcast she hosts, Inside VOICE. The two go rapid-fire through a number of her guests, highlighting the main theme of the episode and what resonated most with Keri from the discussion. Keri shares her unique perspective from covering so many different facets of the voice technology industry making for a fantastic discussion.