Speaker 1: Hello. We're just going to give it a few minutes while everybody joins the webinar. We're going to start in just a few minutes while we give everyone else a chance to join the webinar. So just hold tight for a few minutes. We're going to start in just a few minutes while we give everyone else a chance to join the webinar. Thank you for joining us today. We will start in just about one minute. We're going to start in just a few minutes while we give everyone else a chance to join the webinar. All right. Let's get started. Hello, again, and welcome. Thank you all for joining us for today's presentation, How AI is Transforming Hearing Care, presented by both Dr. Allison Shorgen from the Hearing Center and Don Shum from Whisper. So a couple of housekeeping things before we dive into the presentation. If you could go to the next slide, please. So if you'd like to ask questions at any point throughout the presentation, please drop those in the Q&A, which you will see at the bottom of your Zoom interface, as shown on this slide. I will be keeping track of all of the questions as they come in, and then we have some time set aside for a Q&A session at the end, so we will be sure to answer all of your questions at the end of the presentation. So with that, next slide, please. I'd like to hand things over to Dr. Shorgen to give an introduction of both herself and her practice. So take it away.

Speaker 2: Yes. Thank you, Allie. So I am Dr. Allison Shorgen. I am a clinical audiologist and also the director of audiology here at ENT Associates and the Hearing Center in Fort Wayne. We are an ENT private practice, and we've been in the Fort Wayne community for over 60 years now. One of the things that we're most proud of is the fact that we have the backing of our 13 ENT physicians. The Hearing Center does have four locations in Fort Wayne, and we have satellite clinics in 12 locations across northeastern Indiana and western Ohio. The Hearing Center has 13 audiologists, and really, our audiologists, their mission is to help enhance our patients' hearing using the best technology in the industry. And in turn, that helps them communicate with their family and friends, which then makes a big difference in that patient's quality of life. We are really excited to begin to offer Whisper AI, and so I thank you for your time and joining us so that you can learn a little bit more about Whisper. My excitement really began with learning that they improve technology over time as the patient has the hearing devices using artificial intelligence. They don't have to buy new devices or hardware to get updated technology, whereas all the other hearing aid manufacturers require the purchase of new devices to get that improvement. That improvement in software will help those patients hear better in a complex environment, which especially for loud, noisy environments, and of course, as a clinical audiologist, this is the most common complaint that I get. So anything that can help my patients in those situations, I get really excited about. So we are thrilled to be able to give our patients the option to try Whisper AI devices. We're excited for Don to kind of take over and tell us all a little bit more about the devices. We are offering a risk-free trial of Whisper through the month of September. So we request that you call us at 260-222-7927 to schedule that appointment and get to listen to them yourself. So, Don, if you'd like to take over and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about Whisper.

Speaker 3: Thank you very much. My name is Don Shum. I'm an audiologist. I'm the head of audiology at Whisper. I have been in the field of audiology for over three decades, both as on the industry side for the last couple decades, but before that as a university teacher, as a clinician, as a researcher. So I've seen the world of hearing aids from many different viewpoints, and I've been very excited to be part of the Whisper family as we work towards bringing a new type of technology into the hearing aid field. For the past 30-plus years, I have been a hearing aid person. I've been very involved in the world of hearing aids from different viewpoints, as I said. And when I had the opportunity to become part of the Whisper team, it was a very encouraging time for me because it really gave me the opportunity to join a company that was really challenging some of the assumptions in our field in terms of what technology can do and really pushing the envelope forward. And that was something that as a clinician, as a caregiver, made a big difference to me. So I want to welcome you to the seminar and thank you for your time, and let's get moving. So when somebody like yourself, whether you've had hearing aids before or this is the first time you've thought about the idea of getting hearing aids, when someone is starting to enter the world of hearing aids, they start with certain assumptions. And one of the things that is pretty common amongst a lot of people is that they want to start with the best. You want to be working with Dr. Sorgin and her colleagues if you weren't very interested in getting the highest quality care possible in the Fort Wayne area. You want to make sure that you're dealing with not just the right professionals, but professionals that are using the right technologies, and very importantly, you want to make sure that you're keeping up to date, that as your hearing needs increase, as the technology gets better and better, you don't want to feel like you're getting behind. The problem is in the classic model in our field, the classic way things normally work, you buy a set of hearing aids at some point in time, and the typical hearing aid owner will not end up replacing their devices for maybe four or five years, sometimes even longer. And although those devices were state of the art when you bought them, the world of hearing aid technology moves quite rapidly. And so as time goes on, as the years go by, you'll feel further and further behind. And even if your hearing is relatively stable and your needs are relatively stable, what technology can offer you gets better, but you are using a technology that is just more out of date as the months and years go by. And that's the way we've always assumed it would be, that at some point in time, that the hearing aid user will decide that it's time for an upgrade with their devices and they would get something new. But the concept is the way technology works these days, the way hearing aids work these days, it didn't have to be that way. One of the things that people know is that modern products get better over time. When you get, for example, a new smartphone, a new smartphone has some onboard technologies, it has a camera, it has the ability to make calls, it has the ability to play music or podcasts or whatever it is that you want to. But that hardware is driven very much by the software that's on top of it, the apps that you put on it. So everyone's smartphone is a little bit different because everybody adds different apps to them. And over time, you might find that you need different apps. Maybe you want to have a newsfeed app. Maybe there's something you want to be able to follow your favorite sports teams and so you put on the Hoosiers sports app on it or something like that. Maybe you find that you have a better weather app you want to put on it. But the idea is that modern technology, many modern electronic devices that you deal with these days, they are software driven, meaning that there is some base hardware that has to be there. But most of what you get out of the product is based on the software that you put on it. Same thing with modern televisions. If you get on television these days, not only do you get the typical channels that you would follow, but you get all the different apps that you want to have access to, whether it's YouTube or Netflix or or Amazon Prime or whatever it is that you that you turn to when you're looking for entertainment. Those are also on your system because they can improve all the time. And as new channels come on board or new services come on board or improvements can come on board in terms of the picture quality and things like that, all those things can be upgraded over time because modern electronic devices are software based. Hearing aids are the same way. Hearing aids are software based. There's some core technologies that have to be on board hearing aids in order for them to do the basic job of amplifying sound for you to hear it. But almost everything that you experience from hearing aids is based on the software that's in the hearing aids. But traditionally, what ends up happening with with hearing aids is that when the products are released into the marketplace, the software that's on the hearing aids, the capability that's on the hearing aids is then set in that hearing aid and it doesn't necessarily change over time. Sometimes you might get a bug fix update, but that's about it. When Whisper was started as a company, the founders of the company came from the field of consumer electronics and came from the field of artificial intelligence. And one of the things that they recognize is that, well, if modern electronic devices are software based and you can improve them over time, why can't we create hearing aids that work the same way? And when when the company was started, the founders started it with that concept in mind that hearing aids should be able to get better over time, just like every other consumer electronic that becomes part of our modern world. And so the way Whisper is constructed as a as a hearing system is designed to leave open the possibility that you can provide improvements in the way the device operates over time simply by updating the software. And that's a key feature to the way the Whisper product was originally developed and the way that we continue to develop over time. And the whole idea is to be able to to learn from the field and learn from users and learn from what the experts are saying that the hearing aid should be able to do for patients. And they created a learning system. And so the hearing aids that you would get at the beginning of your experience with Whisper are not going to be the same hearing aids that you're going to have six months down the line or a year down the line or two or three years down the line. Because part of the hearing, part of the idea behind Whisper is to make sure that we continually close that performance gap between what technology can offer you now and what technology was able to offer you when you bought the product. And so with Whisper, what we developed was a system where we can create upgrades for the system a handful of times per year. So once you get the product and the products and it's running and it's set by Dr. Sorgen and her colleagues based on your hearing needs, that may work very well for you right out of the box. But three or four or five months down the line, when we can do better things in the product, we will then send updates to those products, upgrades to those products. So the system gets better over time to better match the needs that you have as a listener. And the idea is we want to get rid of that idea in your mind that you're falling behind what technology can offer you, that that that you that your hearing aid is getting old, your hearing aid doesn't get old because the software is continually updated for you to make sure that you are keeping pace with the very best ideas that we have to be able to solve the problems of hearing loss that we know that you're running into. Another very important aspect of the way we develop the new whisper hearing system is that we we are a San Francisco based company, we're out there in Silicon Valley, and the founders were experts in artificial, are experts in artificial intelligence. And so they brought their knowledge about what sort of problems artificial intelligence can solve to bear on the world of hearing aids. Both the founders, a gentleman named Andrew Song and a gentleman named Dwight Crowe had members of their own family who had hearing loss. And these two gentlemen were very interested in being able to create a new company based on their knowledge and their expertise in the world of artificial intelligence. And they wanted to do something real and meaningful. And it was their experience with family members with hearing loss that made them want to turn to using artificial intelligence to do a better job solving the problem of hearing loss. And so the type of signal processing that that we do in the whisper hearing system is fundamentally different than the way signal processing has been done in hearing aids for decades. Even even when we turn to digital hearing aids two decades ago, the type of signal processing that we do has been relatively static, some of the solutions have gotten better. But the core type of technology that we're using was staying was staying pretty much the same. artificial intelligence now drives so much about the way you experience life on a daily basis from from simple consumer electronic devices like Siri, or programmable thermostats or programmable vacuum cleaners in your room, all the way to some very important things that affect your daily life like medical diagnosis, weather prediction, credit card fraud protection, those are all examples of where the power of AI has been brought to bear to solve very significant problems that people face on a daily basis. And whisper was founded on the notion, not only that a hearing aid can get better over time, but one of the most fundamental ways that it can get better over time was to continually improve our artificial intelligence solution to helping you hear especially in the most difficult environments that you run into, which are those lively, noisy environments that fill up some of the most important and enjoyable parts of our of your day. One of the things that we know is that so many people who run into hearing loss tend to find over time that they just enjoy those sort of situations less than they ever used to, whether it's a big family dinner, or a party with some friends or an important work event, or whatever it is where there's there's multiple people around. One of the things about hearing loss that we know we've known well is that that can start to really become a difficult environment for you to hear and understand and it becomes stressful and it becomes frustrating to people with hearing loss, to the point that oftentimes you may have found yourself starting to withdraw from the situations and avoid those situations. And part of the goal with Whisper was to make sure that that wasn't the case. As much as we possibly could help in those situations, we want to be able to help in those situations. And we felt the key to being help to be helpful in those situations was to introduce some of the concepts of artificial intelligence into the way hearing aids process sound, especially in noisy environments. We do not want people to feel held back because of their hearing loss. We want individuals with hearing loss to feel that they can go anywhere they want and operate as effectively as they as they can possibly imagine, because they're not letting hearing loss stand in the way. That's our goal as a company is to to make sure that you can get the most out of all aspects of your life that you that you're interested in. The Whisper hearing system comes with two very important parts. The first parts shown on the right are the ear pieces or what you have come to know as hearing aids. They are small devices that fit on over the top of your ear and to the back with a wire that leads down into your ear canal with a soft silicone piece, typically that holds the hearing aid in the place and directs the sound into your ear. These ear pieces are full of the type of technologies that that define what advanced modern hearing aid technology is all about. So the same sort of technologies that you find in other advanced products, directional microphones and, and noise reduction and and those sort of things that are designed to take the world of sound and process it and package it to work well within your auditory system. But we know that there are some situations where even the best traditional technologies just are not enough for patients. And that's why we created the third piece to the Whisper hearing system, which is the Whisper brain. The Whisper brain is where the the the heart of the artificial intelligence solution that we've created lies. There's it's a very large in hearing aid terms, signal processor, it's not large as the device, but it's large in terms of the amount of processing power we put into it into this palm sized device that you would pull out and or not pull out, but you would have on you when you were in more challenging environments. So as you go throughout your day, and you run into situations where, where the hearing aids in and of themselves cannot do all the signal processing that is necessary to really help you in those situations. That's where the hearing aid brain, the Whisper brain comes in. It has a function that we call the sound separation engine. And the idea behind the sound separation engine is for you to be in these more difficult environments. And for us to use the power of artificial intelligence to do the best job we can to separate speech from noise, and allow you to function to the best of your abilities in those more difficult environments. Because of that, you can use the Whisper hearing system two different ways. If you're in less challenging environments, you're around your house, it's just you and maybe a spouse or other family members or friends, it's, it's relatively quiet, not particularly challenging, maybe you're watching television, listening to the radio, other things like that, where there's not a tremendous amount of background noise, then the earpieces by themselves work very, very well, like I said that they are full of the technologies that typically define what modern advanced technology hearing aids are all about. But when you find yourself in situations that are more challenging, for example, let's say the whole family joins you for a Sunday dinner, or you decide to go out to your favorite restaurant with your loved ones. Or you're in a situation where it's very important to hear maybe a very important work situation with multiple people sitting around a table or some sort of function. In those situations, that's where the Whisper brain comes in. Because that's where the sound that the sound that's being picked up by the earpieces is sent to the Whisper brain. And that's where you get the advanced signal processing that's applied to the sound and then sent back to the to the earpieces in order to improve the listening environment that listening signal that you that you have access to. As I said, one of the things that was fundamental when the when the Whisper hearing system was developed was the idea of getting upgrades over time, that this is a learning system. So as I said earlier, multiple times per year, we send out upgrades where you would either get the upgrade sent directly to your smartphone into your devices, or more typically, at least these days, you would return back to the office where you got the devices in order for that in order for the system to be upgraded. And when the system becomes upgraded, then you're going to get the very latest signal processing concepts that are that are experts are created for you to be able to best battle against the effects of hearing loss and in the most challenging environments. Our concepts, the things that are very different about the Whisper hearing system, the idea of getting upgrades and improving over time and the idea of bringing the power of artificial intelligence to solve the problems of hearing aids has not gone unnoticed. We've received some very important reviews, and coverage by some very important publications, both within the hearing aid industry, but also in the tech world and in the general world of information, including New York Times, and AARP, etc. People have have noticed what we're doing. And they have identified this as a major step forward in the way technologies can work for people. But it's not just what reviewers and writers write, it's about what users think. And so these are just some of the testimonials that we received from Whisper users over the past year, where they have experienced the value of the Whisper hearing system, they've noticed what it can do for them, whether they're first time hearing aid users or experienced hearing aid users, they've noticed that they are hearing well in situations and it was important for them to be able to speak out and let us know how they felt they were doing. So with that, hopefully that gives you an idea what Whisper hearing system is all about. When you if you're interested, and you visit the offices, the doctor, surgeon and her staff will make sure that the systems are customized to your particular listening needs based on their assessment of your hearing. And they will track you over time to make sure that you're getting the most out of the system that you possibly can. So with that, I'm going to invite Dr. Shorgen and Allie back. And we're going to see if there's any questions that have come up since we've, we've started. Allie.

Speaker 1: Excellent. Thank you, Don. Yep, we do have a few questions. So the first one is, how much does Whisper cost?

Speaker 3: Okay, I think that'd be a good one for Dr. Shorgen to talk about.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so Whisper over the course of three years usually cost about $5,000, which is not outside of what typical hearing devices would cost for you. It is set up more as a lease in terms of the software updates come over time. And so the leasing plan ends up making that monthly payment around $139 a month.

Speaker 1: Great. And another question we have is, how do you phone calls work with Whisper?

Speaker 3: I can handle that one. When the phone calls come in, the, you will have paired your the brain, which is that third part of the Whisper hearing system to your phone, whether it is an Apple phone or a Android based phone, a Google phone or a Samsung phone. And so the brain, the calls would be routed from your phone through the brain to your earpieces.

Speaker 1: Great. How long is the trial of Whisper?

Speaker 2: I think I can handle that one. Typically, we would offer a 30 day trial period of such just like we would with any other hearing devices before deciding that you're going to kind of finalize that lease.

Speaker 1: Great. Let's see. I have another one that is asking, what happens if I lose one of the components or if it gets damaged?

Speaker 2: So I think I can handle that one as well. So that loss damage. So if you lose a device during that, during that lease period, it is covered under that lease and would be able to be replaced.

Speaker 1: Excellent. Thank you. We have another question now regarding the upgrades. How do the upgrades work? And do patients need to go into the office to receive these upgrades?

Speaker 3: It depends on the nature of the upgrade. Most upgrades these days do require you to go into the office because of pretty substantial improvements to the to the operating system within the Whisper hearing system. Sometimes there are things that we have changed that can be done remotely. But for the most part, right now, the patient would need to return to the office. Returning the office is never a bad thing. It's a it's a good opportunity to discuss what your experiences have been, discuss any hearing needs that have developed since you the last time you're in the office. Sometimes even having your hearing rechecked, at least having your ears looked at. And so coming back to the office on a regular basis is never a bad idea.

Speaker 2: And even to some extent, just letting the audiologist check the hearing aids to make sure they're not plugged or they're working to the best potentials that they can. There's been a lot of times patients will come in and see me, they're thinking they're doing, you know, relatively well. And, you know, we clean and check them and change some parts. And all of a sudden, they're like, wow, I'm hearing so much better. I didn't even realize what I've been missing over this time.

Speaker 1: Excellent. So along the same lines of the upgrades, there's another question. Have the systems been updated yet? And when will the next upgrade be?

Speaker 3: Okay, we introduced the first model of the whisper hearing system back in October of last year. So we're rapidly approaching our one year anniversary. Since that release in October, we have upgraded the system three times, basically, a couple major upgrades, plus one little kind of on the fly upgrade that we did in between a couple of major releases. And so those are all examples of where we've been able to add some significant new functionality to devices during the first nine months or so of use. We have another upgrade coming. I don't want to, I don't want to lay a date on it yet, because we don't know for sure. But we have the next level of AI solution in noisy environments. That's the next thing that we want to do on an upgrade. And we are still finalizing you know, the testing and the verification of that. And then once that's all done, we will release that into the marketplace. So that will probably mean that within the first year that we will have had at least three major updates to the system.

Speaker 1: Excellent. So I see just one last question asking, so what happens at the end of the lease term?

Speaker 2: Yeah, at the end of the, I can handle that one. I think at the end of the lease term, you have a couple of options. Really, the first option and the one that is, in my opinion, probably most likely is that you can renew that lease. And when you renew that lease, you typically would get the new hardware. So the devices, the brain, and then, you know, you continue that cycle of getting those software updates, updates over time, you may decide at the end of that three-year lease that this isn't for you. And so it's not for you. You're going to end your lease. And at that point, you could pursue traditional hearing aid technology. Or you may decide, you know what, I don't want to hear at all. So I'm not going to do anything. I would hope that that would not be what patients would decide to do. But, you know, over time, patients change or need to change. And we always have to relook at what's best for you and in pursuing that better quality of life through hearing health care.

Speaker 1: Excellent. And so if there are no other questions, thank you all so much for joining us this morning. We've really appreciated your time. If you could, Don, just advance to the slide with the phone number one more time. There you go. So if you're interested in going into the office to try Whisper for Yourself, we've got a number up on the screen that you can call in and schedule an appointment. Similarly, if you have any additional questions that come to you over the course of the next few days, please, again, feel free to call that number, and we can definitely get your questions answered. So with that, I'd like to thank you all again for joining us. I'd like to both thank Dr. Shorjan and Dom Shum for their time as well. And thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day, everyone. Thanks, Allie. Thanks.