People rely on the (usually very large) dynamic range of hearing to be able to understand in those situations. In people with typical hearing the brain filters out the sounds too loud or too quiet to be what they are trying to listen to. But hearing aids act as compressors reducing the dynamic range.
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>When your AirPods Pro are connected to your device, you can use Conversation Boost to focus on the person talking in front of you. This makes it easier to hear in a face-to-face conversation.
https://support.apple.com/guide/airpods/use-and-customize-tr...
librepods appears to support this feature
Hah, this made me find the subreddit /r/AudiProcDisorder where people discuss those and others for exactly that reason.
edit: Damn, tool requires root because of a bug :/
The traditional solution is an FM system where you give the person speaking a microphone linked to your hearing aids. There are dedicated ones like Phonak Roger. You could probably also use your phone as a microphone if it's bluetooth connected to your headphones or hearing aids.
The tech for isolating a speaker at conversational distances exists. You use half a dozen microphone transducers (minimum; Crappy microphone transducers are cheap and quality is expensive, so just use a bunch of them), and through a combination of phase and intensity they decode relative location, and amplify that phase expectation while suppressing everything that isn't phased like that. Sound is slow, and readily susceptible to real-time triangulation. The math/processing is much easier if the parallaxes are fixed (eg the microphones are arranged in a line array on the top band of a rigid pair of smart glasses), but with a little latency it's not prohibitive for a deformable array to solve for its own relative position as well.
Often people who lose their hearing want to be able to hear in social situations such as restaurants and family gatherings. In this context, the signal and noise have similar properties and are coming from the same direction. Directionality helps but can only do so much. Noise reduction can make hearing aids more comfortable to wear but don't necessarily improve comprehension in challenging situations. Progress here is fantastic -- at the same time it helps to have realistic expectations.
Putting the mic on the person speaking sidesteps the problem -- it's like the rest of the room isn't there.
https://support.bose.com/s/product/hearphones-conversationen...
I absolute loved them, but unfortunately lost them, and they are irreplaceable.
I also liked that there was a neckband - easy to take the buds out when not needed and leave them hanging, and of course more power in a larger battery.
The newest HAs have AI that helps in noisy environments. The ones I have are the Phonak Audéo Sphere Infinio I90s. I've worn HAs for 40 years. It's truly unbelievable in noisy environments. I know it's easy to think it's all marketing garbage, but some great demos on YT of the technology. I keep them in AI mode all the time when I have them on, and charging them for an hour at lunch is enough to get me the necessary runtime.
But it’s cool that this stuff is now integrated, hopefully those advancements will eventually trickle down further, from what I’ve now read, the AirPod Pro feature is a bit of that trickle.
They sure seem to be marketing in your direction. No idea how well they work though.
It’s a brain thing, my hearing itself is above average for my age (40), so I’m not sure what exactly can be done, but there was an article many years ago about someone (Bose?) working on aids for that issue, no idea what came of it. I guess all modern hearing aids have some focus mode.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
edit: In case there’s an airpod suggestion, I’ll also need to know if that feature works on Android, it’s not crippling enough to make me use an iPhone.