Experience what it's like to follow a conversation with hearing loss. Then share it with someone who matters.
By Lilly Seay · Updated July 2026
Tens of millions of Americans have some degree of hearing loss — about 15% of adults report trouble hearing (Source: NIDCD). Unlike using a wheelchair or wearing glasses, hearing loss is completely invisible — which means it's often misunderstood or dismissed. "You hear fine!" is something most hard of hearing people have heard too many times.
Hearing loss isn't like turning the volume down. It's more like someone smearing vaseline over certain frequencies. Words sound muddy, consonants disappear, and your brain has to constantly guess what was said. In background noise, it's exponentially harder.
When the people around you understand what you're going through, everything gets better. They face you when talking, choose quieter restaurants, repeat things without frustration. A few minutes with this simulator can spark that understanding.
Today's hearing aids are engineered for exactly this problem, with directional microphones and noise processing built to pull speech out of the din. Flagship models like the Phonak Audéo Sphere Infinio use a dedicated chip just for separating voices from background noise, and affordable OTC hearing aids — including AirPods Pro with Apple's FDA-cleared Hearing Aid feature — put real help within reach for mild to moderate loss. You can compare current models side by side.
A remote microphone clips near the person you want to hear — across a restaurant table, at the front of a classroom — and sends their voice straight to your hearing aids or earbuds. By picking up speech at the source instead of across the room, it cuts through noise in a way no amount of volume can.
When your ears are working overtime, your eyes can pick up the slack. Live captions turn conversation into readable text in real time, so nothing gets lost in the noise. That's exactly what Hearing Buddy does — it turns your phone into a captioning device you can set on the table at dinner. You can also try our free speech-to-text tool right in your browser.
It lets you experience what conversations sound like with different levels of hearing loss. We layer background noise over speech and filter the audio to mimic how hearing loss affects your ability to understand words — especially in noisy environments.
This is a simplified simulation to build empathy and understanding. Real hearing loss varies widely — it depends on the type, frequencies affected, and many other factors. But the core experience of struggling to follow speech in noise? That's very real for millions of people every day.
Even people with mild hearing loss often hear "fine" in quiet rooms. The real struggle starts when there's background noise — restaurants, family gatherings, busy streets. The brain has to work overtime to separate speech from noise, which is exhausting and often impossible without help.
It might be. Trouble following speech in noise is often the first sign of early high-frequency hearing loss — and some people have what audiologists call "hidden hearing loss," where the standard audiogram looks normal but understanding speech in noise is still genuinely difficult. In other words, a normal hearing test doesn't always rule it out. If restaurants and gatherings feel like hard work, it's worth taking a hearing check and mentioning the noise struggle specifically to an audiologist.
Face them when speaking, reduce background noise when possible, don't shout (it distorts words), and be patient if they ask you to repeat something. Most importantly — understand that hearing loss isn't about volume, it's about clarity.
Please do! That's exactly why we built it. Share it with family, friends, coworkers — anyone who might not understand what hearing loss actually feels like. The more people who get it, the more supportive the world becomes for the hard of hearing community.
Hearing Buddy turns your phone into a real-time captioning device — so you never have to strain to follow a conversation again.
Available on iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac
If cost is the worry, our hearing aid price guide shows what people really pay.