This week on the Future Ear Radio podcast, I’m joined by Andrew Song, Co-founder and President of Whisper.ai. The inspiration for Whisper stems from Andrew and his two co-founders personal experiences’ with family members suffering from hearing loss, combined with each co-founder’s background working in Silicon Valley. Throughout this conversation, Andrew explains how the team at Whisper is attempting to re-imagine the modern day hearing aid.
There are three aspects about Whisper.ai that really intrigue me:
- The Whisper “Brain” – what really stands out about Whisper is the “Brain” processor. As Andrew explains, having a standalone processor allows for orders of magnitude more processing power (1,000-2,000 X more power). You can then allocate that power toward running machine learning and deep neural network algorithms, to much more effectively separate out sound and improve noise performance. Ultimately, this should provide for a hearing aid that sounds awesome.
In addition, the other big benefit of the brain and the artificial intelligence approach that Whisper is taking, is that the device gets better over time by learning from data. It learns through its own data and the data that’s captured from all Whisper devices. Much like Tesla vehicles, all the data is pooled together in the cloud, which the devices then get trained on constantly. It’s a continuous cycle that allows the devices to work as a hive-mind to get smarter together by recognizing specific sounds and tuning them accordingly. - The Three Pronged Approach – As the image indicates below, there’s three parts to this system. You don’t need to carry around the brain with you in order for the devices to work, just as you don’t need to have your phone on you unless you want the Bluetooth connectivity. There are processors inside the RIC hearing aids that function well without the brain processor. For the best experience, you’ll want to carry the brain with you, but it’s not mandatory.
As Andrew explains, Whisper has big plans for the processor and the mobile app. Andrew believes that the app will serve as the main interface between patient and provider, a trend that I expect we’ll continue to see built out across the board with all hearing aid apps.
3. Sold exclusively through hearing professionals in a SaaS model – I find this point to be one of the most interesting aspects to the company. Many industry outsiders have entered the market going D2C, which is understandable, but as Andrew mentions, the hearing professional is critical to their model. They believe that the professionals need to be front and center in Whisper’s distribution strategy and are actively looking to partner with hearing professionals.
The other interesting aspect to their go-to-market strategy is the SaaS model. Subscriptions are everywhere these days, especially for big ticket items where people might prefer to pay them down incrementally. Again, I fully expect this to be a trend that we see pick up a lot of steam in the coming years.
As always, my goal with Future Ear is to shine a light on emerging technologies, solutions and different ways of thinking that hearing care professionals might benefit from. In a world with an increasing number of choices that patients can choose from, I believe that providers can thrive by constantly finding new ways to stand out in the market by differentiating their product and service offerings. Whisper.ai represents another one of these technologies that might serve as an additional way for professionals to further differentiate themselves.
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dave Kemp:
All right. So we are joined here today by Andrew Song. Andrew, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Andrew Song:
I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. My name is Andrew and I’m one of the founders and the president of a new hearing aid company called Whisper. We’re based in San Francisco. A young company that’s a genesis and a combination of a lot of people who have a great passion in hearing, but also have expertise in things like artificial intelligence, hearing aid development and a lot of hearing aid care. So a lot of audiologists on our team. We just announced our product a few weeks ago, so excited to talk more about that as well.
Dave Kemp:
No. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. When I saw that you guys had raised the second series that you had and took a little bit closer look at Whisper, whisper.ai, you really intrigued me for a number of different reasons. Both you personally, but also the company and so, I reached out, wanted to get some time to where we could really just chat, because I do think this is particularly relevant for anybody that’s interested from the consumer and the patient side of things looking at what types of things exist today. I think you guys are taking a whole new approach.
Dave Kemp:
But also, for the professional channel. I think that the fact that you are using and utilizing the professionals and the audiologists, and leveraging them as a means to really distribute your product, I think is super, super interesting. So why don’t we just kick things off. Tell us a little bit about your background. I know that you have a personal story as it relates to hearing loss. If you wouldn’t mind sharing your actual direct personal connection and then how that spurred you to the point of co-founding Whisper.
Andrew Song:
For sure, yes. I know for many people who work in hearing, myself included, there’s often a moment or a person who is their inspiration for getting into it. I’m no different. For me, my inspiration is really my grandfather. I think his story, maybe as I’ve worked in the industrial, is not as unique as I thought it was, but it was definitely surprising at the time. He suffers from hearing loss in his older age. When I discovered this, I found out that he owned hearing aids, because I discovered them in a drawer that he had just sitting there, unused. I asked him about it and of course it’s the typical conversation, “Yeah. Had some hearing loss. Got these things.” But obviously they were in the drawer. They weren’t on his body. They weren’t in his ears.
Andrew Song:
So I started asking questions and really learning about what hearing aids were doing well for him and what hearing aids weren’t working for him. As a relative newcomer, being very naïve to hearing it at the time, this was well before Whisper started, I thought it was really concerning that a family member of mine was diagnosed with a medical issue that’s not curable. I knew hearing loss wasn’t curable. And they went to a medical professional and they got help and they were prescribed a medical device. That medical device cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and then they weren’t using it. That chain of events just seemed so concerning to me. I think it’s probably very concerning to a lot of people who experience hearing loss.
Andrew Song:
So this difference between being that hearing aid owner and a hearing aid wearer or hearing aid user, was something that I spent a lot of time trying to understand. And it ends up being a lot of the things that I know professionals focus on when they talk about hearing loss. There’s an aspect of it that’s about one’s image and one’s acceptance of hearing loss. There’s another aspect that’s about product performance. As someone who has a background in computer science and mathematics, who’s built a lot of technology products, who’s lived in Silicon Valley for their entire career, that’s what I started unpacking a bit. But it all really started from that moment with my grandfather.
Dave Kemp:
It’s interesting because this is part of the problem, is that this particular problem, hearing loss, it faces a myriad of things that cause just low adoption more or less. It might be that he didn’t want to wear them because they made him feel old. So you’re dealing with the constant sort of pervasive stigma that’s associated with this. It could be that because I’ve had a lot of people tell me before about how that first week, that first two weeks, it’s almost uncomfortable, because you’re rewiring your brain more or less. It’s a very uncomfortable period of time for some people. So all these things and you can add in the price. You can add in whatever number of different reasons why you can excuse the reason why there’s only 20% of hearing aid adoption for those that need it. Then beyond that, you only have a portion of those people that are even wearing them the way that they should be.
Dave Kemp:
So we have to do something about this. We really need to address this, and I think we need to address it in a lot of different ways. And that’s what I try to do with this podcast is talk through some of those different things, whether it be more incentive around why you would want to wear these things for longer periods of time, or reasons why I think that they whole stigma that surrounds it is kind of being chipped away at through a lot of the consumer technology that’s coming about. But at the end of the day I think that it boils down to are you really seeing the value that these things can bring? Are you actually benefiting in the way that you should? And I agree with you, it’s concerning that you have these things that we’re presenting the solution to and sometimes that solution is not really being well adopted.
Dave Kemp:
I want to kind of get into, so okay, you have this personal background story, and I know you’ve worked in Silicon Valley. It sounds like you were working at Facebook. Can you just speak to whether it be at Facebook specifically, or any of the other ventures that you were doing. I’m just very, very curious as to what in your background and in your other fellow co-founders’ backgrounds, along with the whole personal side of things, led you to the point to where you decided, “I want to take a totally novel approach to how a hearing aid might look and feel in the year 2020.”
Andrew Song:
For sure. It’s a really interesting story. I would say that for myself and my co-founders, we all have our own unique story about what our inspiration was to hearing. For all three of us it involves different family members. That was kind of independently. It wasn’t dinner table conversation or let’s go grab a beer conversation. But independently we had all felt that. I think the thing that you see and really experience at any company, and technology company especially here in San Francisco Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, is what the opportunity for change really is, in that everyone really has an opportunity to bring something new to the table, if there’s value at the end of the day for a customer. A customer in this case could be either a hearing care professional or an end user.
Andrew Song:
So we all sort of at a high level, understood this problem, especially Dwight Crow, who I met at Facebook. There was a lot of interest back when this was all being thought of, especially from Dwight I would say, around how artificial intelligence would really change every day things. Artificial intelligence it’s still sort of a kind of like a magical incantation. I like to say that it actually matches very much how we as a society spoke about the internet in the 90s. When we talked about the internet in the 90s, you talked about modems and IP addresses and servers. That’s sort of the language we used, like the AI version of that language. But when we talk about the internet today, we talk about what we want to do. We talk about being able to meet remotely. We talk about listening to music or sending money or messaging our friends. We don’t talk about IP addresses every day. AI was going to go through that similar transformation.
Andrew Song:
Dwight’s background, he worked at Facebook on a lot of the marketing and advertising products. But he got to Facebook, because Facebook acquired his last company, which was using AI to accomplish a lot of these similar types of goals. I took maybe a more traditional route out of school, studying software, studying computer science, studying mathematics and being really interested in working on a lot of products that had a lot of positive impact on people. Working on Facebook messenger for a number of years and leading their core consumer product team.
Andrew Song:
We me Schlomo, Schlomo has a very similar background. He had experience personally with hearing loss, was through his family. So he understood that, but he had started a number of companies before that were very successful. Worked on a number of different hardware applications. His experience goes all the way back to Israel where he is originally from working on a lot of the technology that ended up in the Xboxes where you can move, dance, in front of them and it tracks you-
Dave Kemp:
Oh interesting.
Andrew Song:
… when you play those games. That’s one of the first types of technologies he worked on. Yeah, the Xbox Connect. So we all had this idea and this understanding of how we could put something together to make a difference in this industry, but I think it’s naïve to think it starts there. It’s naïve to think, “Well, I have this technology, I have this idea, I’m going to go change the world.” A lot of the early days of the company, and this may speak to why we work so closely with hearing care professionals and why we’re so passionate about that, is really just understanding the problems and the challenges that people have with hearing aids. Not just my grandfather, but as an industry. And there’s a number of them. Some are related to product performance. Some are related to one’s image when we’re using hearing loss. On the professional side, direct to consumer was a really big challenge.
Andrew Song:
But you really start to understand that this idea that we have, that we could make a hearing aid that’s going to get better over time, that we could use artificial intelligence to also improve the sound processing on the hearing aid directly. Not just to use artificial intelligence so that my grandfather could use Siri. My grandfather doesn’t really use Siri that much, so it wasn’t super important. We didn’t hear a lot of people who said, “I really wanted to use Siri. Go use AI to do that.” What they really said was, “I want it to sound better. I care a lot about noise performance.” People buy these things and they spend money on them, because they really want to not just hear things, but connect with the world. They want to have a conversation with people. They want to have that independence.
Andrew Song:
That’s the path that we set off on when we really felt like, “Hey, this is a real thing.” And we’ve been really fortunate I would say to have great investor support to build this company. Because as I’m sure all of your listeners know, building a hearing aid from the ground up is not necessarily the easiest thing. It takes a really talented team with a bunch of different diverse skills. But it also takes great investor support and that’s why we’ve been really happy at the partnerships we’ve had there. Not just to have the money and the funding to do this, but also to have this support and the vision that we can really make a difference in this space.
Dave Kemp:
No. I think that’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing all that. I think these new novel approaches to traditional ways that we’ve always sort of combated, that the core issue I think are really a welcome sight for sore eyes. My thought is, I think that what you’re doing in terms of kind of unbundling the hearing aid is super fascinating to me, so let’s get into the actual product itself. I think this is where a lot of people are going to be really interested and really get an understanding of how this works. It’s basically a three part system as I understand it. You have the RIC hearing aids. Then you have the brain, the processor, which I really want to speak to. Then you have the mobile app. It’s kind of a combination of your phone, this standalone piece, the processor, and then the traditional behind the ear hearing aids. Can you just speak to how this system works and then we’ll really dig into different facets of it?
Andrew Song:
For sure. I think the most important thing, especially for professionals to understand, is though we use a lot of new technology and bring a lot of new ideas, the end goal that we’re trying to achieve is very similar to other hearing aids in that we want people to have a natural comfortable hearing experience through their hearing aids. That includes not just what the user does, but also how fitting works and things like that, which I’d love to talk about.
Andrew Song:
For us, I think one of the key things that we identified is that AI would be really important to making a better sounding hearing aid. I liken it to the change between analog and digital hearing aids that happened decades ago, where there’s a fundamentally new type of idea, a new type of algorithm, a new type of processing scheme that will drive the next decades of innovation in hearing. That’s our very strong belief. And it’s not just our belief if you look at research, if you look at papers, if you look at what the forefront of hearing technology and hearing performance is right now. A lot of it is in AI, machine learning, neural networks, whatever word you want to use to describe it. It all can me the same thing to me.
Andrew Song:
So I think that’s the first difference. And when you unpack that, it sort of gets into why we have the brain and how our system works. In order for artificial intelligence to be really powerful, to not just be an after thought, but to be an integral part of the hearing system, fundamentally the hearing aid needs to have more processing power. I think as an industry, as hearing aids have tried to squeeze out more and more performance over time, we’ve also tried to make them smaller and smaller and there’s a good reason for that. There’s a consumer demand for it to be smaller and smaller.
Andrew Song:
But, at the end of the day, when you’re trying to make things smaller and more efficient, you maybe don’t ask the questions enough times of, “How do I make things much better?” One of the things that you need to make things much better is a larger processor to run these AI models, these things that are helping separate out sound, helping produce better noise performance, helping doing all these things that affect the sound. That’s where the Whisper Brain comes in.
Andrew Song:
The Whisper Brain is really a piece of the system that works seamlessly with the ear pieces. It’s not a remote microphone, it’s a processor. You can have it in your pocket, you can have it nearby. You don’t need to put it on the table or anything like that. It works entirely remotely. What that is doing is in conjunction with the hearing aids, evaluating the sound, the environment from an acoustic point of view and completing different types of processing, to using AI to get that better sound performance.
Andrew Song:
When I talk about having a faster processor or having more capabilities there, it’s really a huge difference. Inside of the Whisper Brain, you can imagine there’s about anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 times the processing ability in that device. Imagine my grandfather instead of having two RIC devices, we had the processing power of say 2,000 to 4,000 RIC devices, 1,000 on each ear, to process sound. What would we do with that? We would be able to do so much more. Just think about the innovations in hearing that have happened in the past 10 years without AI even. Surely over the next 10 years we will be able to do so so much more. So we wanted to make it in a format that was really easy for people to use, not cumbersome.
Andrew Song:
The hearing aids still work without the Whisper Brain. If you want to go garden in your backyard, you don’t need to manage it and have it on a neck loop or anything like that. You just leave it on the front table, just go outside. The hearing aids still have a processor. It still functions very well, Like any great hearing aid, just with the earpieces alone. But there’s a number of situations in the world where that elevated performance is really what people are looking for and that’s what the Whisper Brain is there for.
Andrew Song:
The second aspect I think that’s important, that’s not yet, I think, as felt, because we’re still new, is that the Whisper Brain is really what makes it possible for the hearing aid to improve over time. To learn so to speak. We think actually long-term, that’s going to be the thing that people really love about our product. Because as you know, every year the big five get up, they announce new products. Some are bigger improvements. Some are smaller improvements. For their premium devices, if someone wants to upgrade they ask another five, six, seven, maybe $8,000. For a consumer, that’s a painful thing to hear about. If you bought your hearing aids last year and the manufacturer announces a new product, you want that benefit, but you definitely don’t want to spend $6,000 again. Not only can we give people that benefit without changing their hardware, but we can give it to them sooner. We think about making updates on the months timeline, not on the years timeline. And that has a real advantage to people because it means their hearing better as soon as that innovation is ready.
Dave Kemp:
So yeah, I mean, I kind of almost liken it to Tesla. It’s like these constant updates. I’m curious, so with the whole brain being something that’s constantly learning, it sounds like there’s obviously updates that entails, but is there an omen in machine learning there too, where it’s just picking up over the course of time, different acoustic environments that you’re in and then it’s more or less adapting you to them? Is there an element of that as well?
Andrew Song:
Yes, for sure. Artificial intelligence is really what allows us to make the types of improvements, the types of upgrades that we’re talking about really possible, so it’s definitely a core part of the piece. Early on, I think … Tesla is a great example … we actually will focus a lot on improvements that aren’t just about the individual, but are about every individual who’s using the hearing aid. You can liken to maybe a great example is going to an airport let’s say. I live in San Francisco, so I fly through San Francisco International Airport, though not really anymore, during the present times. But, in theory I used to go to San Francisco International fairly often and San Francisco International Airport, like lots of places in the world, are really complex acoustic situations. There’s a Starbucks in the corner, grinding beans, making coffee. There’s gate announcements. There’s people talking. There’s a person speaking to me. There’s all of this chaos happening around.
Andrew Song:
Our hearing aid can understand that environment and give us the right data to learn and improve the hearing aid performance in that space. Now, it would actually be a shame if only I got that benefit. The next person that flies from let’s say Denver to San Francisco, using the Whisper Hearing System, they want that benefit too. Even though that may be the first time they’ve ever been to San Francisco International Airport. There’s no reason why we would want to keep that from them. So a lot of the learning early on that is powered by this AI, I really think about this kind of networked idea where all of the devices are helping us ultimately understand the sound in the world. The patterns of sound, how to break it down, how to understand it, how to improve it for people who use hearing aids. Then the software upgrades are how we deliver that to every hearing aid, every Whisper user that uses our product.
Dave Kemp:
That’s fascinating. I mean, so let’s use that analogy or that example of the San Francisco airport. So you’ve got a year’s worth of users, pre-pandemic, post pandemic, that are high foot traffic areas like the San Francisco airport. Then I come along and I’m a new user and I walk through there for the first time, what exactly is that going to translate to? Is it just going to be the way that the certain acoustic environments are shaped? It’s almost going to help to maybe mute or turn the ambient volume down in certain situations. I’m just curious how this actually would manifest itself over the course of the data that you have when you really do start to apply that data for any of the new users or existing users.
Andrew Song:
That’s a great question. I think we like to separate out what’s happening inside of the hearing aids versus how a consumer might experience it. What’s happening inside of the hearing aid is very complex, because there’s new data. There’s a new understanding of how we might have better noise performance. Talking specifically about San Francisco International Airport, it’s generally a noisy place like all airports. So there’s a lot of different things that are changed and updated and improved to the core hearing aid system, whether that’s on the AI side or on the traditional signal processing side, to ultimately achieve better sound performance. Whether that’s less noise or better signal to noise ratio, or any of these key things that consumers want.
Andrew Song:
Now a consumer won’t see all of that. A consumer’s interaction with our device, they’ll hear the difference. They’ll experience the difference, but we don’t think it’s necessary for them to think through all of these components of the system and understand what they AI is doing versus not what the AI’s doing. What is exactly from this versus that. Ultimately they have a relationship with that professional. The professional has fit that hearing aid to them for a specific loss, for specific preference sometimes in terms of what type of sound they like. So we want to take that, we don’t change that, we honor that. That’s why the professional is so important. That’s why we rely on them. But we use all of the tools and improve all of the tools on the hearing aid. All these hearing aid feature end more, that everyone sees to, to ultimately produce a better sound.
Andrew Song:
So we hope that from a consumer, when they walk into San Francisco International Airport, they just say, “Hey I can have a” … They maybe don’t even think about their hearing aids, because what they’re thinking about is the gate agent they’re speaking to or the Starbucks order they’re trying to have. They’re just getting a better life outcome of it. That’s what we think for hearing aid users especially, is what is really important to them. And ultimately what’s important to the professionals too.
Dave Kemp:
I love that, because I think that really what you’re saying is that this will all just be happening in the background. It’s invisible more or less. So, again going full circle, with your grandfather, maybe it’s just that the reason that he’s not going to have those just sitting desktop drawer is because places like the airport, now suddenly are an enjoyable experience. Maybe that was something that was a little bit obnoxious, or whatever it might be, overwhelming. So I do think this is a really important point, that it’s sort of all just magic that’s happening in the background more or less and a lot of it’s being done because of the more or less, the data that’s being captured at a macro level and then being applied on an individual basis as it learns. I think that’s an important piece.
Andrew Song:
For sure, yes. And in the world, the world of sound is very complicated. There are places where you don’t need AI. You don’t need anything to make it sound right in a quiet sound booth with someone yelling at you. You don’t need a hearing aid to hear that generally. Even if you have hearing loss, you can hear it just fine. There’re some places that are really complex that even if you have great hearing, it’s really challenging and those will continue to be a challenge. But what we really see is not just that we have the technology to make the sound experience better for the hearing aid that you buy today, but we have the ability improve that across a number of different situations, in a number of different places in the world over time, so that the consumer at the end of the day … So for the consumer, they feel like they bought a hearing aid. It’s updating and improving over time.
Andrew Song:
Of course, there may be hardware improvements that will be necessary. Better microphones or something like that. But those tend to be much longer term changes than the premium hearing aid from a big five manufacturer last year to this year. Those tend to be much smaller changes and things that we can deliver in the period of months at a time through these upgrades. So they feel like they’re getting the best care. And ultimately for the professional, what I hope is important, and again, goes back to why we work with professionals, is we would rather they focus on the consumer’s hearing issue, not on the consumer’s hearing aid issues.
Dave Kemp:
I love that.
Andrew Song:
Even though as a hearing care professional, at least many of the ones that I talk to, they want their patients to have the best hearing technology. They want it to be up to date. But they understand the practicality of asking someone to pay $6,000 every year for a hearing aid, let’s say as an example. Maybe seven in some places. Maybe eight in some places, for a premium hearing aid. That’s just not realistic. We agree, and so that’s why our distribution system is different. The payment model is very different. Because we fundamentally believe that equipping the hearing care professional and the end user with the best technology is the win-win for everybody.
Dave Kemp:
This is a good segue, because I think that one of the other things that really captured my attention is your emphasis on the subscription model. You’ve really already iterated a number of reasons why this makes sense given what you are bringing to market, but I try to always make mention of the fact that if you look outside of this industry and you see what’s happening, you’re noticing that everything is moving more or less in some capacity toward things like subscriptions. I think hearing aids are a really good example of the type of this kind of completely changes the whole motion of everything. I love what you said about this idea of worrying less about hearing aid technology and worrying more about treating the actual hearing loss. So, can you speak a little bit about this whole SAS model that you have and maybe some of the benefits to that, that you hadn’t already mentioned?
Andrew Song:
For sure, yeah. I think a lot of the benefits … I want to speak about the consumer first, because ultimately-
Dave Kemp:
Sure.
Andrew Song:
… the pricing and distribution is really targeted around them. And then I want to talk about how the professional is involved with that.
Dave Kemp:
For sure.
Andrew Song:
There are really, I think, two reasons on the consumer end why this subscription really makes sense. Two reasons that consumers have told us. The first one is maybe more of a simple affordability and access issue. Many people who use hearing aids are a bit older. I think that’s pretty known by the audience. And many people who are in that age category maybe on fixed incomes. Maybe in a number of situations where spending $6,000 for a premium hearing aid all at once today, is not the most exciting thing for them, even though they have the long-term savings to be able to afford something like that. So just from a simple affordability point of view, taking the device and making it a monthly cost, has a great benefit just for access to premium technology. I’m of the belief that if you have hearing loss, hearing is so important to the extent that you can, you really do want to have the best technology that’s practical for that person.
Andrew Song:
So it just makes it more practical I think and it makes it a lot of the other payments and a lot of the other things they’re dealing with maybe in life. Whether that’s their cell phone or their internet service. And really, for a lot of experienced hearing aid users, they understand that this hearing aid, they’re going to be using hearing aids for the rest of their life, because hearing loss is not treatable. I liken it to the iPhone. When you buy your first iPhone, you’re like, “Oh, it’s so expensive, but I’ll buy it and this is the last iPhone, I’m going to buy.” Now 10 years later, we all have a drawer full of phones that we never use anymore, that we paid up front for. You’re like, “Okay, I don’t need all of these anymore.”
Andrew Song:
And hearing aids are the same way. Lots of people who are very experienced hearing aid users, if you go to their home and ask them to see their drawer of hearing aids, they’ll open up a drawer and they’re be a decade and a half of hearing aids there. Is that doing anyone any good? Probably not. Are they excited to add another hearing aid to that list, that they’re again, paying $6,000 let’s say for? Probably not either. So I think this is just a simple access issue too.
Andrew Song:
I think the other aspect and maybe the more important aspect on the pricing model and the subscription that we have, is it really matches the value of our product at the end of the day. Our product is a hearing aid that gets better over time. It involves the care of a professional. Like you said, when you try a new hearing aid, especially if you’re a new user, there will be adaptation. You’ll want to make changes. Your preferences for how you hear sound may change as you age. There’s plenty of research on that.
Andrew Song:
So not only does it make sense for you to pay for this device that’s improving over time, over time. You want to pay for it over time, but also, it’s naïve to think of hearing aids as an iPhone or as glasses, where you kind of pick it up from the store and then you hope to never go to the store again. I think the better model is to think of it where there’s this collaboration between the professional and the consumer. And this model better fits into and better explains to the end user what that value is. And we think that professionals really understand that.
Andrew Song:
Now on the professional end, I think this distribution model adds some complexity. The first question I get asked from professionals is, “Well, am I selling a hearing aid today, but earning this monthly?” We know that how we manage that’s very important to the professionals, because especially independent audiologists have businesses to run. They have a clinic to keep up. All of these important things. So we take a lot of the work out of that. Whereas a professional, when you fit a Whisper device, the profit that you earn on that device, is given to you upfront. And they don’t have to manage the monthly payments. That’s something that we work with them and we work with the patient to help them do.
Andrew Song:
So at the end of the day, they’re able offer this new type of idea, this new type of model. They don’t have to deal with a lot of the complexities that come with that, especially the business complexity, because ultimately I don’t think they really want to, nor do we think they should have to. We take on that burden. We think it’s a good marriage for solving what the consumer needs are, but also helping make sure the audiologist continues to be successful in their practice.
Dave Kemp:
Well thank you for walking me through all that. I think that was really, really informative, and I agree with you. Regarding the professionals, what type of service are they obligated to with this? I mean, so you fit somebody with the Whisper device, and I think a lot of the professionals will want to maintain those relationships, so I don’t think it would ever want to be like a just, “Okay, wipe my hands and off you go.” Obviously, there’s going to be a level of support. But I’m curious, is there packages or something that the professional … Can you just walk me through the service piece of this where a patient that’s being fit with Whisper three months down the line needs some level of support, what are some of those options and are they facilitated through your app? How are these things done?
Andrew Song:
So we really want to make sure that the relationship between the patient and the hearing care professional stays as the relationship between the hearing care professional and the patient. That stays there. And not a relationship where Whisper is … especially where professionals feels like Whisper is getting in the way or getting in the middle of that. That’s not where we think our role is. That would go counter to the whole idea of working with professionals and trusting professionals.
Dave Kemp:
For sure.
Andrew Song:
When a professional dispenses the Whisper Hearing Aid System, when they sell the Whisper Hearing Aid System, part of what they’re committing to, like many practices around the U.S., who have not unbundled, let’s say, is some level of support. I think at a minimum that level of support is what I would say a pretty standard of care where you do a fitting. There’s some sort of followup. The followup can vary in time depending on the practice’s operational policies and care procedures. Then for us, as we give updates, some of those may be best delivered by the hearing care professional, because again, the consumer may change and we expect that the professional would help do that. Again, because they’re trying to maintain. Our whole model is about them being able to deliver the best hearing care.
Andrew Song:
There’re often things in professionals where a consumer may want care that’s outside of the scope of their hearing aids. They may need ear was removal hair services as an example.
Dave Kemp:
[crosstalk 00:35:06] hair.
Andrew Song:
We wouldn’t think of that necessarily as part of the service that they’re delivering. But if we look at for hearing care practices in the U.S., what their Whisper profit would be. How that works out in terms of their service, how that works out in terms of the subscription, it really should be one of the most profitable systems that they have in their practice. That they’ve ever had in their practice. Not only because they’re delivering a great product, and distributing great service, but they now have a product that helps them differentiate their care. Differentiate what they’re offering and differentiate from just a hearing aid sales where they have to answer the question of why, “I have a Phonak product here” … Not to pick on Phonak. “I have a Phonak product here and a Phonak product at Costco, tell me the difference.” It elevates the conversation and gives them an opportunity to educate their consumers about what hearing care really is about. It’s not just about a hearing aid.
Dave Kemp:
What’s really, really interesting to that point is this idea of differentiation in the market. I think that a lot of the theme of this podcast has been, I want to identify as many things as possible that I can bring to the professional, say like, “This can help you stand out in the market.” Whatever it might be, even if it’s just a subtile new feature that you can be mixing in when you’re having those fitting or early consultations. Or it’s a totally new premise of a hearing aid. So I think there are going to be people that are really intrigued by this.
Dave Kemp:
My question is, if you are a professional, how do you get involved? How do you become somebody that’s part of the Whisper network and then when you become part of the network what does that entail? Are you somehow, are you given leads in some capacity? If I go as a consumer to Whisper.ai and I want to be fit with one of these or something like that and I see I have a provider in the area, can you just talk through what the network of providers and how that process works with you all?
Andrew Song:
Yeah, that’s a really great question. We always want to work with great professionals around the country to provide the product. The easiest way if somebody is interested, they’ve heard about us, is they can just email us, hello@whisper.ai. It’s a nice and easy email address to remember. Or they can go on our website and there’s a professional section where they can fill out a form and we’ll get back to them and give them a call or send them an email very, very quickly.
Andrew Song:
Ultimately when you’re signing up to be a Whisper provider, I don’t think it’s really that different from when they’re a provider of say one of the big five hearing aids. There’s a certain component of it, we want to work with professionals that are excited about what we have to offer, because we’re really excited about it. We work with lots of professionals. It’s ultimately not in anybody’s best interest if they’re signing up and they say, “Well, I don’t really like this product, but let me just sign up.” It’s important that the professionals want and understand the value of Whisper. Of course we give them training. We help explain that. We help make sure it’s right for their practice and a number of different things like that.
Andrew Song:
But when you are a Whisper practice, there’s a number of different things and it really varies practice by practice, by what the practice owner and what those professionals want within that practice. Some practices, I’d say most practices, because they’re excited about our product, really want to make sure that their existing patient base knows about the product, knows what the benefits are. I think every hearing care professional has some idea in the back of their mind of the individuals who maybe on a four year old device, five year old device, thinking about upgrades. They’re having those conversations every day. And Whisper can be part of that conversation and we can help them doing that. Whether that’s something as simple as making sure they have the right brochures, to designing collateral with them, to helping them with campaigns. Helping them explain the product. Helping them do all this stuff. That’s I think something that we commit to with all of our practices.
Andrew Song:
There’s another level above that where some practices do want to take in leads that we have. We have people who reach out to us directly, consumers who reach out to us directly who are excited about it. And we’re excited to get those people to a great provider. We’re excited to get them greet hearing care too. For some practices, that’s something that’s interesting to them. Not all practices want to take that step, but there are a number who do. That’s where we can help actually send consumers to that professional for a hearing evaluation. For some of them they may need an updated audiogram or hearing test. They want to do a demo of the Whisper Hearing System, so they can really try it out. That’s also an option. But it’s not a requirement I’d say to work with us. I think the only requirement that they have is that they’re excited about what they’re doing, because we’re excited about working with great hearing care professionals.
Dave Kemp:
I love it. No, that’s great. As we kind of wrap up, what about the mobile app? Is there anything in particular that you want to point out as it pertains to the app? I mentioned at the onset, kind of a three pronged system. You have again the hearing aids. You have this independent sound separation engine, the Whisper Brain, which I think we’ve gone through and talked about the value there. Then you have the app. So what aspects does the app facilitate? And obviously with apps, you can always be innovating as well, so it seems like along the same vein of being able to constantly roll out new updates, there might be features and functionality that you can build out there. So curious to hear that particular aspect of the solution.
Andrew Song:
I’m so glad you asked about the app, because I think it’s a piece of hearing aid product territory that’s not often thought about, but really important. We think is a really important touch point for end users. And then ultimately, for professionals as well. I would think of our app, especially as we launch, kind of the basic version of it, as a more intuitive maybe remote control for the hearing aid. I think this is pretty common within the hearing industry today. To be able to change volume. To be able to understand the system’s status, battery levels let’s say. To change listening programs or environments. These types of things are often much easier for people to do on a mobile phone, because the interface is larger.
Andrew Song:
They don’t have to reach up and touch their ears or find a button. It’s more discreet, so you can imagine if you’re at a dinner table with guests and you may not want to highlight that you’re wearing hearing aids. There’s nothing that does that like sticking your finger at the top of the ear and starting to jam in there to try to change the mode or change the volume. A mobile phone is a much easier to understand simple interface. That’s a base level of our mobile app and what it can do and why I think people will want to use it. There’s the level on top of that, where it’s going to be how we will deliver some software upgrades in the future. So that makes it easier, especially for consumers who are a little bit more tech savvy, who don’t want or don’t need the assistance of a hearing care professional to do that. That’s also a benefit and relieves some operational load from the professional themselves. I think that’s really important. Something we think a lot about.
Andrew Song:
But I think the future of the mobile app is we hope a really great entry point to build a dialogue between the end user, the professional and Whisper. Because ultimately, these are the three components of the system to help deliver great hearing. If an end user is microwaving something, then that beeping that happens when they’re microwaving then sounds weird, I think it’s a little bit odd that they will have to wait til their next appointment to bring that up and have some fitting adjustments. And if those fitting adjustments were to make a difference, they wouldn’t really know until they drove home, microwaved something again, and by that point they’re not longer in the office. They’re not longer in the clinic. They can’t get help for it.
Andrew Song:
So there’s a lot of simple things about how we can use the mobile app to better build a dialogue to deliver better care. Better able to understand. Even if the individual is able to record a sound of their microwave and share that with their professional, share that with us, that I think would have a lot of benefit. So ultimately I think, what we want, I think the mobile app can be thought of as the consumer portal into their hearing care. That really starts with how they use their hearing aid and tune it and do connectivity and adjust battery and all of these day to day things. But I think our real vision for it is to be a bigger part of the care system that’s kind of I feel missing right now. So we hope to be able to build that out over time.
Dave Kemp:
No, I love that. I think that the whole patient, professional interfacing piece, the app seems to be the most well suited entry point for that. To hear that’s sort of maybe some of the vision you have with the app is really, really encouraging, because again, for the professionals out there, it just allows them to extend their value and make their value more accessible. Then for the patients, it just allows for them to receive that care wherever they might be. I love to hear all of that. Super, super interesting product. Very interesting delivery model and pricing model. So one more time, as we wrap up, share where professionals and people that might be interested as consumers, patients, can go to read more about Whisper and get in touch with you all.
Andrew Song:
For sure, yes. If anyone is interested in learning more, I think our website is a great place to start. That’s at http://www.whisper.ai. That W-H-I-S-P-E-R.ai. For folks who are interested to learn more, especially the professionals who listen to you show, emailing hello, H-E-L-L-O@whisper.ai would be a great start. To the extent that folks have more questions, feel free to send them in. We love working closely with professionals. We want to make sure they understand what we’re doing. We want to make sure they understand why our solution is different, so we love having those conversations and we work very directly with everybody to make sure they get great support from us. So we’d welcome the conversation.
Dave Kemp:
Awesome, Andrew. Well thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for everybody who tuned in here to the end and we will chat with you next time. Cheers.
