Groundbreaking hearing aid technology was five years in the making
Eden Prairie, Minnesota (March 16, 2023) – Starkey’s Genesis AI is the hearing industry’s greatest engineering achievement to date. The five-year journey to the recent launch of Genesis AI began in 2017, when Achin Bhowmik, Ph.D., stepped into the role of Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Starkey. The former Intel Corporation executive and Starkey President and CEO, Brandon Sawalich, kept the project under wraps, secretly developing and testing the new technology for years. In the latest episode of Starkey Sound Bites, released today, Dr. Bhowmik shares the backstory with podcast host and Starkey Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Dave Fabry. He also dives into the high-tech details of what sets Genesis AI hearing aids apart from the rest: they are built to mimic the brain.
“The brain is an amazing computational system. In fact, the most amazing computational system that we know of. At its core, you have a network of neurons that are heavily interconnected and then learn from the information that is thrown at it,” said Bhowmik. “When a kid is learning to recognize language, they're basically training that neural network. Copying a page from biology, the technology equivalent of that is a deep neural network built into the device. Well, there are two ways of doing that. One, you could just build it in a software, which is what most people have done so far. With Genesis AI, it was an opportunity for us to go one step further and build a hardware architecture where neurons are interconnected in a block on the chip itself.”
The all-new Starkey Neuro Processor within Genesis AI features the industry’s most advanced processor technology, which mimics the function of the central auditory system through a Deep Neural Network (DNN) on-chip accelerator. It is the smallest processor ever by Starkey, but also the most powerful with 6X more transistors. It is also loaded with 5X more computational memory and 10X the amount of non-volatile memory.
To listen to the full interview with Dr. Bhowmik, visit StarkeySoundBites.com or find the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
About Starkey
Starkey is a privately held, global hearing technology company headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Owned by Bill Austin since 1967, Starkey is known for its innovative design, development and distribution of comprehensive digital hearing systems. Led today by President and CEO Brandon Sawalich, Starkey has more than 5,000 employees, operates 29 facilities and does business in more than 100 markets worldwide. Learn more at starkey.com.
