Amazon Fire TV Now Streams Audio Directly to Hearing Implants

People with hearing loss can now stream sound from Amazon smart TVs to cochlear implants.

Using the open-source Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids (ASHA) protocol, Amazon aims to make entertainment more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The tech, according to Amazon software engineer Michael Forzano—who is blind and uses cochlear implants—”takes the strain” out of watching TV. “I’m really excited for the world that this is going to open up for me,” he said in a statement(Opens in a new window).

Forzano didn’t watch much television before, but when he did, he would usually miss up to 50% of the words due to echoing and poor sound quality. Enter Cochlear, a medical device company that designs, manufactures, and supplies the Nucleus cochlear implant (CI) that provides a person with moderate-to-profound hearing loss with sound perception.

“When we talked to customers who use hearing aids, audiologists, and other experts in the field, the majority told us that the first thing you really want if you’ve got hearing loss is to be able to hear clearly the people around you,” says Peter Korn, director of accessibility for Amazon Devices. “The second thing you want is the ability to hear the television, to enjoy entertainment.”

Korn’s team managed to bypass the implant’s microphones and stream audio from Amazon Fire TV directly into the implants, all while preventing sound degradation from noise and echoes. Think of it like a built-in Bluetooth device that, instead of beaming tones into your ear canal, electrically stimulates the auditory nerve, which the brain learns to interpret as speech and sound.

“We send the audio in little packets over to the hearing device. The hearing device acknowledges receipt of those packets of audio, and then more are sent, and so on,” Korn says. “We also did the work to ensure that this protocol works over living room distances,” allowing customers a 10-foot TV radius to hear the TV.

Anyone with a Cochlear Nucleus 8, Nucleus 7, Kanso 2, or Baha 6 Max implant and ASHA-enabled Fire TV Omni QLED Series, Omni Series, 4-Series, or second- or third-gen Cube can now pair the technology(Opens in a new window) to start streaming Prime Video, Netflix, local TV networks, and more.