Buddy+ · Needs headphones

Quiet voices, turned up

Boost Audio turns AirPods, Bluetooth, or wired headphones into a real-time sound amplifier — lifting speech by up to 39 dB and shaping it to your own hearing test from Apple Health.

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Sometimes you do not need the conversation written down. You need it louder. Boost Audio uses the microphone on the phone in your hand and the headphones already in your ears, so the soft-spoken pharmacist, the quiet relative, or the person two seats away comes through clearly — without carrying another device.

+39 dB
Of gain available for quiet speech
3 presets
Conversation, Meeting, and Restaurant — chosen for you
≤100 dB
Hard peak limit, so a sudden noise can't spike

It shapes sound to your ears, not just louder

Turning everything up equally is a blunt instrument — it lifts the clatter of plates as enthusiastically as the person talking. Boost Audio runs a five-band equaliser tuned to the frequencies that carry speech, followed by a compressor that pulls up the quiet parts without letting the loud parts run away.

If you have taken a hearing test on your iPhone and saved it to Apple Health, Boost Audio can match its curve to your results, adding more where your hearing needs it and less where it does not. It follows the half-gain rule that audiologists have used for decades — roughly half the correction of your measured loss at each frequency — rather than simply maximising volume.

Take a free hearing screening →

It reads the room for you

Three tunings cover the situations that actually cause trouble: Conversation for one-to-one, Meeting for a table of people, and Restaurant for somewhere with a lot of competing noise. Boost Audio listens to the ambient level and picks one when you turn it on.

If it guesses wrong, you change it with a tap. The point is that you should not have to fiddle with settings while someone is mid-sentence.

There is a ceiling, and it is deliberate

Amplification can hurt you. A door slamming or a plate dropping while your headphones are boosting is exactly the kind of transient that causes damage, so a brick-wall limiter sits at the very end of the chain and is specified to keep what reaches your ears at or below 100 dB SPL. No preset, and no amount of turning things up, gets past it.

That is a safety net, not a licence. Boosted sound is still sound, and it still adds to the weekly dose your ears are carrying — the same arithmetic that applies to music through the same headphones. If you use Boost Audio for hours a day, it is worth understanding how that dose accumulates.

Check your weekly listening dose →

Why it insists on headphones

Boost Audio will not run through your phone's speaker, and if your headphones disconnect mid-session it switches itself off. That is not a limitation we failed to remove — it is the whole reason it is usable. A microphone and a loudspeaker in the same room amplifying each other is a feedback squeal, and pointing that into someone's ears at high gain is genuinely dangerous.

Ask for it before your headphones are connected and it will simply wait, then switch on by itself the moment they appear.

How to use Boost Audio

  1. 1

    Put your headphones in

    AirPods, any Bluetooth headphones, or wired ones. Boost Audio needs a headphone route before it will start.

  2. 2

    Turn Boost on

    It listens to the room and picks a preset — Conversation, Meeting, or Restaurant. Override it with a tap if it guessed wrong.

  3. 3

    Point the phone at the voice

    The phone's microphone is doing the listening, so the closer it sits to whoever is speaking, the better it sounds.

  4. 4

    Match it to your hearing (optional)

    If you have a hearing test saved in Apple Health, switch on audiogram matching so the boost is shaped to your own results.

What it is — and what it isn't

This one matters more than most, so we will be blunt about it.

It is not a hearing aid

Boost Audio is a sound amplifier feature in an app. It is not a hearing aid, not a regulated medical device, and it does not diagnose or treat hearing loss. If you have hearing loss, the devices designed and regulated for that are OTC and prescription hearing aids — not this.

It won't replace a fitting

Matching to your Apple Health audiogram is a sensible starting point, not a professional fitting. An audiologist measures things a phone cannot, adjusts for how you actually hear in the real world, and follows up. A curve derived from a screening is a rough approximation of that.

It needs headphones, always

No speaker mode, by design. If your headphones drop out, Boost switches off rather than risk a feedback squeal at high gain.

There is a little latency

Sound has to be captured, processed, and sent to your headphones. It is small, but if you can also hear the person directly, you may notice a slight doubling. It works best when the headphones are doing most of the hearing.

It is a Buddy+ feature

Unlike captions, which are free and unlimited, Boost Audio is part of Buddy+ at $59.99 a year, $9.99 a month, or $7.99 a week.

The details

Price
Part of Buddy+ — $59.99/year, $9.99/month, or $7.99/week
Maximum gain
Up to +39 dB on quiet speech
Safety limit
Final-stage brick-wall limiter specified to keep peaks at or below 100 dB SPL
Presets
Conversation, Meeting, Restaurant — auto-selected from ambient level, manually overridable
Personalisation
Optional five-band EQ matched to your Apple Health audiogram using the half-gain rule
Output
AirPods, Bluetooth, or wired headphones only — never the phone speaker
Requires
iOS 26.0 or later

Questions people ask

Is Boost Audio a hearing aid?

No, and we will not describe it as one. It is a personal sound amplifier: it makes what the microphone hears louder and clearer through your headphones. Hearing aids are regulated devices intended to compensate for hearing loss, they are fitted to your ears, and you wear them all day. If you have hearing loss, that is the category you want — start with our OTC versus prescription guide.

How is it different from Apple's Live Listen?

The idea is similar — phone as microphone, headphones as receiver. Boost Audio adds speech-tuned equalisation, automatic presets for different rooms, dynamic compression that lifts quiet speech without letting loud sounds through, a hard peak limiter, and the option to shape everything to your own audiogram. It also sits alongside live captions in the same app, so you can read and listen at once.

Can I use it with AirPods?

Yes — AirPods, other Bluetooth headphones, and wired headphones all work. What it will not do is play through your phone's speaker, because a microphone and speaker amplifying each other produces feedback.

Can it damage my hearing?

A limiter at the end of the chain is specified to hold peaks at or below 100 dB SPL, so a slammed door cannot spike into your ears. But amplified sound still counts toward your total weekly exposure, exactly like music does. If you are boosting for hours every day, run your listening habits through our headphone safety tool and keep an eye on the total.

How does it use my hearing test?

If you have an audiogram saved in Apple Health, Boost Audio can shape its equaliser to it — applying roughly half the correction of your measured loss at each frequency, which is the half-gain rule audiologists have long used as a starting prescription. It is a reasonable approximation, not a fitting, and it does not send your results anywhere.

Does it work at the same time as captions?

Yes. Many people run both: listening to the boosted audio while reading the transcript catches what each one alone would miss.

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Try it for yourself

Captions are free and unlimited, with no account and no credit card. Download it and see whether it helps.

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Requires iOS 26 or later · iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac & Vision Pro