Fortell Sets New Hearing Aid Performance Records in Independent Testing

NEW YORK, September 15, 2026 — Fortell today announced that its Fortell AI Hearing Aids achieved the highest overall and speech-in-noise scores recorded by independent hearing aid testing laboratory HearAdvisor. Fortell exceeded HearAdvisor’s five-point scoring scale, earning an overall SoundScore of 6.0 and a speech-in-noise score of 6.4, surpassing a previous record of 4.5, making it HearAdvisor’s best performing hearing aid of 2026. 

HearAdvisor evaluates hearing aids using a standardized, objective protocol, fitting devices to an acoustic manikin surrounded by calibrated loudspeakers to reproduce listening conditions and measure sound delivered to the ears. Its overall SoundScore combines five measures: speech in noise, speech in quiet, feedback suppression, own-voice quality, and streamed music quality.

Fortell’s record speech-in-noise result was achieved using first-fit settings, without additional tuning. The devices also earned a first-fit speech-in-quiet score of 5.4, exceeding the previous first-fit high of 4.7, and a perfect result in the laboratory’s feedback management test. These results reflect performance under HearAdvisor’s laboratory test conditions.

“Patients and audiologists should be able to evaluate hearing technology using hard data from reputable independent testers, not manufacturer claims,” said Matt de Jonge, co-founder and CEO of Fortell. “These results are powerful independent validation that Fortell has raised  the bar for what hearing aids can do.”

The laboratory findings complement Fortell’s clinical research: In a double-blind, randomized crossover trial conducted with researchers from NYU Langone, participants had approximately 19 times the odds of correctly understanding speech while wearing Fortell compared with the premier  competitive AI hearing aid, under the study’s test conditions. 

“These results are powerful independent validation that Fortell has raised  the bar for what hearing aids can do.”

In a separate blinded study published in the International Journal of Audiology, 95% of participants reported that speech was easier to understand with Fortell than with top-tier hearing aids from all five major manufacturers.

Fortell uses custom AI chips and spatially informed source-separation technology designed to distinguish speech from competing sounds in real time. Its proprietary chip delivers 235× more compute than conventional hearing aid processors and performs up to 100 billion operations per second, with end-to-end latency under 10 milliseconds. This allows Fortell’s AI models to run continuously on-device, separating voices from background noise without perceptible lag.

Full results and testing methodology here.