Sonova believes that the introduction of Phonak Audéo Sphere Infinio is a technological advancement that will give the company a decisive competitive advantage.

In addition to a brand new chip for the core, the hearing aid also features a special chip with real-time artificial intelligence that separates speech from background noise for the benefit of users.

While this produces good results in terms of sound quality, it also represents a hurdle that the company’s competitors, including Danish companies Demant and GN, find difficult to overcome.

“It takes about four years to make a chip and one to two years to determine what it should do. Those are the six years we are talking about here,” said Arnd Kaldowski, CEO of Sonova, on Tuesday during a capital markets day at the company.

“There is no comparable chip on the market – that’s why we decided to go with a proprietary solution. We don’t know if any of our competitors are developing it, but that’s the time frame for a project like this,” he continues.

And even though the competition is tighter than expected, Sonova has a head start because the company is the first to take the step of actively using artificial intelligence to improve the sound quality of its products.

This means that the Deep Neural Network (DNN) that Sonova has built for this purpose is now being continuously developed further.

“We haven’t stopped training our DNN. We train it every day, so in two years you will see a product that is even better trained and maybe even able to do one or two more tricks,” says Arnd Kaldowski.

English translation: Simon Øst Vejbæk