Phonak just launched the Audeo Infinio Ultra Sphere, a prescription hearing aid that breaks from industry norms by packing two processing chips instead of one. The Swiss company's flagship device pairs its older Era chip with a new DeepSonic deep neural network processor designed to isolate speech from background noise, no matter which direction voices come from. It's a bold hardware bet in a market where most competitors stick to single-chip designs, but the premium approach comes with trade-offs in size and performance consistency.
Phonak is making a counterintuitive gamble with its latest hearing aid. While the rest of the industry chases miniaturization, the Swiss manufacturer just released the Audeo Infinio Ultra Sphere - a behind-the-ear device that's deliberately bigger than its rivals, all in service of fitting two processors under the hood instead of one.
The naming might sound absurd ("Sphere" refers to spherical sound processing, not the product's teardrop shape), but the engineering rationale is straightforward. Phonak paired its 2024-era Era chip, which handles standard audio processing and wireless connectivity, with a brand-new DeepSonic DNN chip. That second processor runs deep neural network algorithms focused exclusively on one task: isolating human speech from ambient noise, regardless of where voices originate in a room.
Wired's Christopher Null spent a week testing the Ultra Sphere after professional fitting by a Phonak representative. His verdict reveals the promise and limitations of this dual-chip strategy. In noisy environments - restaurants, busy streets, crowded offices - the hearing aids delivered noticeable but not transformative noise suppression. Background din got dulled enough to improve conversation clarity, though Null notes it's "nearly impossible to quantify exactly how much better" the performance is compared to single-chip alternatives like the Jabra Enhance Select 700.
