Back in the action: How Fortell helped Jon restore his social life

The bass was thumping, strobe lights were cutting through the dark, and a hundred teenagers were tearing across a club dance floor. For Jon—a Chicago father of two with a large extended family—this was a scene he knew by heart. And usually, it was one he couldn't wait to escape.

A few years earlier, at a Bar Mitzvah for his nephew in this exact same venue, Jon had spent 80% of the night standing in the hallway outside the party room. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be there; it was that his hearing aids made the room physically impossible to be in. 

"It was a lose-lose situation," Jon remembers. "If I turned the volume up to hear a conversation, the devices also blasted the background noise until it was overwhelming. But if I turned the volume down to drown out the noise, I couldn't hear a word anyone was saying."

But this night was different. Jon had just been fitted with his Fortell AI Hearing Aids. He wasn’t retreating to the hallway. He was on the dance floor. He was at the dinner table. He was in the room for the entire night.  

"My wife got emotional," he says. "It was the first time in ten years we could be in that environment and actually communicate. It had been foreign to us for a decade."

Before Fortell, Jon’s hearing loss was a social puzzle

Prior to Fortell, Jon’s life had become a series of tactical maneuvers. Because of his Usher syndrome  diagnosis, which couples hearing loss with progressive vision loss, every social outing required a tactical audit of the environment.

"Every restaurant required research," Jon says. "Is it dark? Is it loud? Are there corner tables near a wall? There was effort every single time I wanted to be social."

When the effort outweighed the reward, Jon simply opted out. He skipped weddings. He stayed home from birthday parties at loud bars. Even Sunday mornings were a challenge; taking his two young kids to the local gym—a whirlwind of bouncing basketballs and screaming toddlers—felt so intimidating that he rarely did it without support.

"In a loud environment, [my old hearing aids] were a disaster. They amplified everything equally." 

From a wall of sound to selective speech amplification 

For years, Jon relied on the latest top-of-the-line hearing aids available. They were essentially a volume knob for the world: they made things louder, but not necessarily clearer. While they worked in a quiet office, he was hit with a wall of sound in noisy environments like restaurants, coffee shops, and social gatherings. 

"In a loud environment, they were a disaster," Jon recalls. "Everything was amplified equally. A plate clanking in the background had the same weight as the person speaking across from me."

As a 15-year veteran of the startup world, Jon was naturally skeptical of AI promises. Despite hearing exciting things about Fortell’s AI, he flew to the New York City clinic in mid-December with his guard up. "I didn’t want it to work," he admits. "I didn’t want to be let down again."

The skepticism broke once he stepped outside to try the hearing aids in the street. The usual roar of traffic felt distant, almost eerie in its quiet, until someone spoke. The clarity was surgical. 

Next, he stepped into a coffee shop to test them out. "I realized I wasn't bothered by the espresso machine at all," Jon says. "I could hear the barista ask, ‘Can I take your order?’ with zero effort. These devices are a totally different experience from anything I tried in the past."

"With other hearing aids, I heard all sounds... Now I only hear what I want to hear."

Reclaiming Friday nights 

The difference between Jon’s old hearing aid and Fortell comes down to one thing: selective speech amplification. His previous hearing aids amplified everything equally, turning a crowded room into a wall of noise. Fortell, by contrast, pulls the speech he wants to hear to the foreground while suppressing background noise.

"With other hearing aids, I heard all the sounds," Jon explains. "Now, I only hear what I want to hear." For a man who spent years researching floor plans and scouring Yelp reviews for details on acoustics just to enjoy a dinner date, the world has finally opened back up. 

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