Hearing aid costs and performance are a major source of complaint for many people who use, or should use, hearing aids. Probably the most intractable challenge facing manufacturers is how to make speech audible and clear in a noisy environment. If you’re a reader of my blog, you’ve probably experienced the frustration yourself. It’s such a stubborn issue that it has its own widely used shorthand: cocktail party problem.

But it’s possible that help is on the way. In December 2025 a new hearing aid came on the market. Called the Fortell, it’s made by a startup of the same name. The hearing aid looks like a conventional hearing aid with a behind-the-ear processor and an in-the-ear component, which can be a dome or a custom-made mold, housing a speaker. It acts pretty much like a conventional aid as well, with one significant difference. The Fortell has a program called Front Voices, which is activated manually and which is remarkably successful in isolating background noise, including other voices, from the speaker you want to hear. In a Zoom interview, Matthew de Jonge, one of Fortell’s founders, referred to this as “turbo” mode.

Hearing-aid users who tested it were bowled over by the experience. Trying out the hearing aid on the street in noisy SoHo, one listener said, “This was so incredible that I burst into tears.” Mario Svirsky, a prominent Speech and Hearing Scientist at NYU Langone who consulted on a Fortell study, told journalist Steven Levy, writing in Wired: “The results were overwhelming. I’ve never seen such a categorical result in my career.” In an interview last week, Svirsky hedged that a bit but he was still enthusiastic. Other highly respected consultants also praised the technology. Abram Bailey, AuD, founder of Hearing Tracker, told me that a test his lab did on a prototype revealed better speech in noise performance than any the lab had tested to date.

Hearing aids improve all the time, developing new ways to improve the hearing experience, especially in noise, and new features. What used to be available only at the high end is now available at Costco or even over the counter.

But progress up till now has been incremental. Today’s hearing aids are significantly better than they were even a decade ago. Significant but not revolutionary. Fortell’s technology could turn out to be the first in a whole new approach to making hearing aids as effective as the human ear when trying to hear speech in a noisy place. The cocktail party problem may be on the way out, just as the cocktail party itself has faded away.

This post is an excerpt from a detailed look at the Fortell. Click here to read the full article at ClearHealthCosts.com.

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my memoir Shouting Won’t Help, and for more practical advice try Smart Hearing. Both are available as Kindle or paperback.