AI that improves life: Bringing the benefits of Infinio to everyday listening

Artificial intelligence is everywhere in hearing aid marketing, yet the true value of AI is often unclear to patients and professionals. Infinio Ultra and Infinio Sphere Ultra were developed to deliver meaningful benefits in real communication and overall well-being.

Anyone who has searched for information on hearing aids in recent years has undoubtedly encountered marketing claims and technical jargon about artificial intelligence. Many of these messages focus on chip performance or system complexity.

Although these details can be impressive, the real benefit of AI-powered hearing aid features, improved patient quality of life, can easily get lost in the noise (pun intended).

At Phonak, we take a holistic view of the benefits of hearing care. We believe hearing aids should not just allow patients to hear more speech. They should make speech easier to understand. By easing understanding and communication, it is our hope that hearing aids improve social well-being and overall quality of life.

This holistic view of the client experience informs how we plan and prioritize clinical research.

Introducing Infinio Ultra and Infinio Sphere Ultra

This holistic philosophy guided the development of Infinio Ultra and Infinio Sphere Ultra. These new technologies represent an important step in applying AI to real-world patient benefit.

Infinio Ultra and Infinio Sphere Ultra incorporate two different AI-based features:

AutoSense OS 7.0 classifies the acoustic environment and steers the hearing aid program. ASOS 7.0 is a machine learning system, and it is now 24% more accurate in classifying the environment type. This increase in classification accuracy was made possible by increasing the amount of sound samples in its training by 18x.¹
Spheric Speech Clarity (SSC), which is a powerful, DNN-based denoising system to deliver a new level of speech clarity. SSC is able to directly extract speech from background noise, enhance the speech for better clarity, and integrate it back into the output of the device. The result is clear speech for any voice, from any direction.²

Our clinical research went beyond traditional measures of audibility, sound quality, and speech intelligibility to include understanding speech in complex environments, reducing listening related fatigue, the ability to ignore one talker and block interferers, and overall social well-being.

The results were impressive, and several highlights are summarized below.

Improved speech understanding in complex environments
Participants were presented with 5-word sentences in noise, with each word coming from a different loudspeaker. To correctly repeat the sentence, participants had to accurately hear and piece together words from multiple locations. They performed 44 percent better with Spheric Speech Clarity, than with StereoZoom 2.0, a binaural beamforming system.³
Reduced listening fatigue
Participants completed a challenging speech task requiring them to listen for a specific name (“Kerstin”) while ignoring competing speech. Across repeated measurements during a long testing session, participants improved their performance when using Spheric Speech Clarity, while performance declined over time with StereoZoom 2.0. This suggests they fatigued less with SSC, as fatigue typically prevents effective training on a task.³
Better ability to block out interfering talkers
In another analysis of the same dataset, participants could better understand the target talker with SSC, even when there was more overlap time between target and distractor sentences.³ This indicates improved ability to focus on the intended talker while blocking distractors.
Improvements in overall well-being
In survey research conducted primarily in Vancouver, Canada, patients from a local hearing care clinic reported improved confidence and willingness to engage socially after wearing Infinio Sphere for a month. Significant others also reported meaningful improvements in communication. These findings will be described in more detail in a publication planned for early 2026.

AI designed for quality of life

The research discussed here shows how advanced technologies like AI-powered Spheric Speech Clarity influence factors related to social well-being and overall quality of life. These outcomes extend far beyond simple speech intelligibility.

Learn more in the AI in Audiology webinar series

You can also explore this topic further by watching Dr. Kevin Seitz-Paquette’s presentation in the AI in Audiology webinar series, titled “Hearing care of the future.” The full session is now available online. Access the webinar series here.

Explore clinical evidence in the Phonak Evidence Library

For additional research and clinical insights related to Infinio Ultra, Infinio Sphere Ultra, and Spheric Speech Clarity, you can visit the Phonak Evidence Library. This resource provides detailed summaries, study results, and peer-reviewed materials that support the findings discussed in this article. Visit the Phonak Evidence Library here.

References:

Sanchez, C., Giurda, R., Hobi, S., Preuss, M. (2025). AutoSense OS™ 7.0 adapts 24% more precisely to listening situations. Phonak Insight. Retrieved from: https://www.phonak.com/evidence, accessed December 2025.
Wright, A., Kuehnel, V., Keller, M., Seitz-Paquette, K., & Latzel, M. (2024). Spheric Speech Clarity applies DNN signal processing to significantly improve speech understanding from any direction and reduce the listening effort. Phonak Field Study News. Retrieved from https://www.phonak.com/evidence, accessed December 2025.
Latzel, M., Heeren, J., Lesimple, C., Gökalan, M., Puhlemann, L., and Haf, C. (2025). Spheric Speech Clarity improves speech understanding and reduces both listening effort and fatigue. Phonak Field Study News. Retrieved from https://www.phonak.com/evidence, accessed December 2025.