AirPods Pro Hearing Aids are now official. After updating my iPhone 16 on Friday, October 25 to Apple’s release of iOS 18.1, this ground breaking feature has been enabled. I personally have been eagerly awaiting this upgrade since early this year.
As of today, October 27, Apple still reports the Pioneering Hearing feature – Coming Soon. If you are waiting, as I have been, to find out how your Apple AirPod Pros work as very affordable hearing aids, get ahead of the rush and enable yours today.
Steps to enable the Hearing Aid feature
- From a compatible iPhone go to Settings > General > Software Update and install iOS 18.1
- Find a quiet place and put on your AirPods Pro, Pro 2
- Go to Settings > Bluetooth and connect to AirPods
- Once connected, the circle i
- Click Take a Hearing Test
- Once completed click Hearing Assistance (your hearing test results are automatically made available)
- Toggle Hearing Aid to on
Adjustments
Tweak your personal preferences for the AirPods Pro Hearing Aids by going to Adjustments.
Toggling ON the Conversation Boost (not shown) helped me hear family more clearly.
All this is obviously new, but testing out various features, experimenting, can be fun and rewarding.
Other OTC Hearing Aids
As an early buyer of the Bose Hearphones, this remarkable technology became my primary hearing device for nearly 7 years. At that time when the Hearphones were not allowed to be called hearing aids, but that’s what they were. They performed better, with far more features. than every OTC hearing aid I have tried prior to the introduction of the AirPods Pro Hearing Aids. Hopefully some features on the discontinued Hearphones will be adapted by Apple in coming releases.
Trying OTC hearing aids over the past 12-18 months have all had flaws compared to the Bose Hearphones. This is a link to a review of the Audien Atom Pro OTC Hearing Aids.
My personal hearing loss is defined as “moderate”. Some frequencies are fairly close to normal, while others are very poor.
I would love to hear from you,
email: Wm@WhereIDwell.net
