How to use Conversation Boost with your AirPods and iPhone
March 3 is World Hearing Day. To celebrate, I’ve put together short looks at the powerful hearing support features Apple already provides within its products, principally AirPods.
What is World Hearing Day?
World Hearing Day is about awareness, prevention, and support for hearing loss. This matters, around 12 million people in the UK live with some form of hearing loss. That’s one in five adults and 40% of those over 50-years old.
The RNID’s Speak Easy report found that 81% of people with hearing loss said they had difficulty holding a conversation due to high levels of environmental noise in restaurants, cafes and pubs.
Apple offers a range of useful tools, including Noise and Health App on Apple Watch and iPhone, which help monitor your sound exposure; Adaptive Transparency, which reduces the volume of harsh environmental noise; and Sound Recognition, which notifies users of specific sounds, like a dog barking or baby crying.
But today’s report explains how to use Apple’s powerful Conversation Boost tool.
What is Conversation Boost?
Announced at WWDC 2021, Conversation Boost uses your AirPods Pro or AirPods Max to help you hear conversation, even in environments with a great deal of background noise. The idea is that this feature blocks out those ambient sounds that get in the way and lets you hear the person in front of you. It can make a huge difference if you find it hard to hear what people are telling you.
How to use Conversation Boost
First you must be wearing your AirPods, and they must be connected to your device.
- Now open Settings>Accessibility>Audio/Visual>Headphone Accommodations. You need to toggle the feature to switch it on.
- Tap Transparency Mode, turn on Custom Transparency Mode, then turn on Conversation Boost.
- Now, with Hearing mode added to Control Center and wearing your AirPods, open Control Center and tap the ear icon.
- Tap Headphone Accommodations>Transparency Mode.
- Tap outside the menu and tap Conversation Boost to turn it on.
Now, I don’t think this is easy to explain or particularly clear, so here is an explanation video Apple has made available to help you begin to use this feature:
https://youtu.be/8MOKVQNX1mU
Happy World Hearing Day. More tips here.
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