The Greatest Hearing Aid in History: Transcription via Large Language Model

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David Owen, Subtitling Your Life; Advances in transcription are good news for the heard of hearing. New Yorker, Apr 28, 2025, at page 18.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazi ... ubtitling-your-life
https://archive.ph/tZJir#selection-1609.28-1609.84

Note:
(a) David Owen (author)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Owen_(author)
(1955- ; "He graduated from Harvard in 1978 with a [bachelor's] degree in English.   Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991")
(b) "when he was in his mid-forties, my friend David Howorth lost all hearing in his left ear, a calamity known as single-sided deafness. 'It happened literally overnight,' he said. 'My doctor told me, "We really don't understand why." ' * * * (He and his family had moved there from New York after one of his daughters pricked a finger on a discarded syringe while climbing on rocks in Prospect Park.) * * * he was fitted, for the first time, for hearing aids. The type he got was designed specifically for people with his condition, and included a unit for each ear. The one in his dead ear has a microphone but no speaker; it wirelessly transmitted sounds from that side to the unit in his functioning ear. * * * he received a cochlear implant on the other [ie, right] side."
(i) "when he was in his mid-forties, my friend David Howorth lost all hearing in his left ear, a calamity known as single-sided deafness. 'It happened literally overnight,' he said. 'My doctor told me, "We really don't understand why." ' "
(A) "There are two types of hearing loss; conductive and sensorineural hearing loss.[1] Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is the most common type and accounts for the majority of all hearing loss. SNHL refers to any cause of hearing loss due to a pathology of the cochlea, auditory nerve, or central nervous system." StatPearls for "Sensorineural Hearing Loss" dated Aug 23, 2023.

"conductive [suggesting middle ear, which is made up of three small bones, whose vibrations are sent from eardrum to inner ear]* * * Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is the most common type and accounts for the majority of all hearing loss. SNHL refers to any cause of hearing loss due to a pathology of the cochlea [another name for inner ear], auditory nerve [connecting inner ear to brain], or central nervous system"
(B) 11 Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SSNHL). In "Hearing Loss in Adults: Assessment and Management." London: National Guideline Centre (NGC), National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), June 2018 (NICE Guideline, No 98)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK536521/
(paragraph 1: "Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) is an ENT emergency and is defined as a loss of hearing of 30 dB HL or more, over at least 3 contiguous frequencies, that develops within 3 days. Most cases are unilateral and the commonest age group affected are adults in their 40s and 50s. In 90% of cases no underlying cause is identified and it is considered idiopathic. Idiopathic SSNHL affects approximately 5–20 per 100,000 people per year in developed countries with an equal gender distribution. The hearing loss can range from mild to profound and can be temporary or permanent. Idiopathic SSNHL significantly impacts on individuals’ lives, causing considerable disability, especially if there is a preexisting hearing deficit in the other ear")
(ii)
(A) Prospect Park (Brooklyn)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_Park_(Brooklyn)
(B) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) loses infectivity after exposure to air for minutes. There are other infectious diseases to worry about, but not AIDS.
(iii) "The one in his dead ear has a microphone but no speaker"

Amy Sarow, How Hearing Aids Actually Work. Soundly, Sept 12, 2024
https://www.soundly.com/blog/how-hearing-aids-work
("Speaker (Often Called a 'Receiver') [which is sectional heading:] Every hearing aid has a tiny speaker that broadcasts sound to the wearers ear. The speaker must be small enough to fit inside the hearing aid while still being powerful enough to amplify sound adequately")
(iv)
(A) The English noun cochlea (adjective: cochlear) descends, via Latin, from Ancient Greek kochlos snail. (That -- snail -- is what inner looks like.)
(B) Composition of Hearing [ie, Cochlear] Implants. Colorado West Audiologists, undated
https://cowestaudiologists.com/h ... s/hearing-implants/
("The external components consist of a speech processor with attached microphone to pick up sounds and digitize them, which are then sent to the connected transmitter.   The internal components consist of an implanted receiver that is connected to an electrode array that sits within the cochlea. The external transmitter typically sits on top of the receiver with a magnet. External components can be removed for showers and for sleep")
The (external) microphone is connected to a transmitter (also external) that sits on top of the receiver with a magnet. The receiver is the implant (that is placed "just under the skin" (from the Web) -- not in the (skull) bone. The implant's electrode array (meaning many electrodes) stimulate cochlea and/ or auditory nerve.


(b) "he has begun using a free voice-to-text app on his phone, Google Live Transcribe & Notification. * 8 * for Howorth and many others with hearing problems, the breakthrough has been acquiring the ability to subtitle life. 'It's transcription that has made the difference,' Howorth told me. The main contributor has been the tech industry's staggering investment in artificial intelligence. Live Transcribe draws on Google's vast collection of speech and text samples, which the company acquires * * * Back in the days when software came on disks, I bought a voice-to-text program called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. * * * Zoom's captioning utility shows him everything the rest of us say, identified by name, and he responds, by speaking, without a noticeable lag. The app even ignores 'um'—a feature that I had trouble explaining to Howorth, because Zoom left it [the very 'um' when David Owen explain 'um' in speech rather than text to Howorth] out of my explanation, too. * * * For people who couldn't hear, silent movies were an accessible form of public entertainment, since dialogue that couldn't be deduced from the action appeared on printed title cards [shown transiebtly in the screen]. * * * Subtitles are easy to add to film, but, for the most part, they were used only when actors and audiences spoke different languages. In 1958, Congress created Captioned Films for the Deaf [the difference between English nouns subtitle and caption is the former is used when actors speak a language other than English; I am talking about programs displayed in America which, generally speaking, uses English] * * * 'My dad came down once, and said, "Why don't you turn up the volume?" '  he told me[Ari Shell]. I said I didn't need to, because I knew exactly what they were saying [by reading lips].' * * * Microsoft Teams, a videoconferencing app, which she [Cristi Alberino] called 'the single greatest thing ever invented.' Teams includes a captioning utility, which works the way Live Transcribe and Zoom do."

Dragon NaturallySpeaking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking
("is a speech recognition software package [first] developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which was acquired * * * [ultimately] Microsoft"/ table: Initial release  1997 + [latest release: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 16 in 2023] + Operating system  Microsoft Windows + Available in         
8 languages)


(c) "Madhav Lavakare, a senior at Yale. He was born in India * * * Lavakare's company is called TranscribeGlass. He has financed it partly with grants and awards that he's received from Pfizer, the US Department of State and the Indian government, programs at Yale, and pitch -a trnasitive verb whose definition is 'to attempt to persuade especially with a sales pitch' in merriam-Webster,com] competitions, including one he attended recently in New Orleans. His glasses require a Bluetooth connection to an iPhone, which provides the brainpower and the microphone, and they work best with Wi-Fi, although they don’t need it. You can order a pair from the company's website right now, for three hundred and seventy-seven dollars, plus twenty dollars a month for transcription [I cannot imagine what this is for; I thought AI does all the work of transcription], which is supplied by a rotating group of providers. * * * he [Omeir Awan] had Bell's palsy and neurofibromatosis type II (NF2), a rare genetic disorder that’s characterized by the proliferation of tumors throughout the nervous system, including the parts that govern hearing and balance.
(i)
(A) palsy (n): "PARALYSIS—used chiefly in combination"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palsy
(B) Bell's palsy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_palsy
("Symptoms can vary from mild to severe[:] They may include * * * weakness, or total loss of the ability to move" muscles of the face)

That is palsy. Paralysis is complete loss of muscle use, palsy CAN be partial. In this Wiki page, the top photo shows the man's paralysis of his tight face: unable to move lip and face to show teeth on the right side and lack of wrinkles also.
(ii) Cuong Le; Aby Thomas; Forshing Lui, Neurofibromatosis. StatPearls, last updated on May 4, 2025
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459329/
("NF2 has an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern and is characterized by the development of bilateral vestibular schwannomas and meningiomas. * * * A loss-of-function mutation of the NF2 gene causes NF2 and is located on chromosome 22q12, coding for the protein Merlin. Merlin is a cell membrane protein and a tumor suppressor")