Bose gets into the hearing aid headphone business

When you’ve got a punny name as good as “Hearphones” (no Google, I did not mean “headphones”) in the chamber, you owe it to the world to deliver product. For Bose, the emerging space of hearing-assisting headphones was the perfect place for that fun bit of word play.

The company’s newly unveiled earbuds seem to occupy a similar spot as a number of emerging bits of hardware, including Nuheara’s IQbuds, which we described as a cross between a headphone and a hearing aid when we saw them a while back. Ditto for the Hear One and Sony’s MDR-1000x noise canceling headphones, which were unveiled back at IFA.

app-iphone

The Hearphones sport directional microphones that can be used to focus in on or amplify specific sounds, while actively canceling out background distractions. All of that is fine-tuned with Bose’s already launched Hear app, which features a variety of different settings, which can be saved for future reference, along with pre-sets like “gym” and “airplane.”

Bose didn’t do a big announcement this time out, like it did with its new pairs of QuietComforts earlier in the year, instead opting for a soft unveiling, along with some in-person trials, which are running between now and the 15th at its Framingham, Massachusetts headquarters.