Apps We Love!
We understand how stressful this time can be, especially if you face communication challenges. Online meetings, classes and appointments can be frustrating at best, added stress could be making your tinnitus worse, and you may feel like you need more aural stimulus to maintain cognition. The Hearing and Speech Center is here for you at this time! Below you’ll find a list of our favorite apps that can help with all these problems, many of which are completely free. Click on each app title to be taken to the app’s websites for more information!
Tinnitus app favorites:
These are also great to just help you get to sleep if your mind can’t stop worrying about the COVID 19.
Sound Oasis Lite or Pro:
One of our favorite tinnitus apps because it has a lot of choices on sounds from white noise choices and nature sounds, whether you use the free version (Lite) or the pay version (Pro) this is a great app to manage tinnitus.
White Noise Lite by TMSOFT:
A wonderful, free tinnitus app which allows you to mix multiple sounds, including white noise and nature sounds. It has a timer and an alarm that you can wake up to. TMSOFT offers many app choices for TV platforms as well as guided meditation, check out their website to see what app you think is best for you!
Aural Rehab apps and online programs:
Aural rehab can reduce one’s perception of hearing difficulties, improve one’s perception of quality of life, help one to become a more effective user of hearing technology and communication strategies, and improve one’s personal adjustment to living with hearing loss. Here are some AR programs you can try while you are sheltering in place.
Hear Coach:
A free app from Starkey that we think is a great place to start and see if you are finding benefit in a program. Hear Coach is a suite of listening games that challenge both your cognitive and auditory sharpness. A different background noise stimulus within each of the levels provides you with varying degrees of difficulty to help you train your auditory system in different environments.
Hearoes:
A free app using game modules with different background noise stimulus within each of the levels to provide you with varying degrees of difficulty to help you train your auditory system in different environments.
LACE:
An online program developed at UCSF. Auditory Training programs retrain the brain to comprehend speech up to 40% better in difficult listening situations such as noisy restaurants, rapid speakers and competing speakers. Just as physical therapy can help rebuild muscles and adjust movements to compensate for physical weakness or injury, LACE can help you develop skills and learn strategies for dealing with situations when hearing is inadequate. Also like physical therapy, it takes consistent training. If you are ready to commit to this program, you should plan on completing the training within 2 weeks to really reap the rewards of this program. The cost of the program is $79, but you can purchase a code from us for just $40.
Check out this video for a great overview of the program!
clEAR:
An online program developed by Dr. Nancy Tye-Murray and tested at Washington University in St. Louis. clEAR improves speech discrimination, which is your ability to recognize words accurately and reduces mental effort so that listening becomes less exhausting. This program is game based and has many modules to work through. The cost is $24.99 per month and if you are ready to commit, you should set time aside several times a week to do this training to receive the most benefit.
Advanced Bionics Resources:
Though Advanced Bionics is a Cochlear Implant company, they offer free and paid apps that are wonderful for hearing aid or cochlear implant users of all ages. We highly recommend you check out Clix, one of many useful apps available. This app trains your brain to help discriminate word differences in quiet and noisy environments. Plus it’s totally free!
You can sign up for a free account here and follow the steps.
Communication Apps:
These can be any apps that can help with communication be it family, phone conversations or needing an ASL interpreter.
AVA:
This app provides free real time captioning using the microphone on your phone or laptop. The reason we love AVA is that is allows you to connect to other phones or bluetooth mics for captioning. If you are working from home or taking classes remotely, you can put your call on speakerphone and run the AVA app to have live captioning for your call! You could download AVA to an iPad as well and use it to caption your voice to a family member who has trouble hearing and the captioning will be large enough for them to see if there is any vision loss. Best of all AVA has extended their free trial period for AVA Pro and AVA Campus to 30 days. Learn more about different options here.
Otter:
This app provides free real time captioning using the microphone on your phone. They have a free version that give you 600 minutes a month of service at no cost. If you need more time, you pay for the premium option at $9.99/month.
SonicCloud:
An app that allows you to self-tune any sound coming through your phone to give speech better clarity and maintain natural quality. You can use your headphones or connect to your hearing aids if they are Bluetooth capable. You can also download the app to your laptop to tune the sound while you are binge-watching Netflix over the next few weeks of self-quarantine. The cost is $9.99 per month, but they do have a 30 day trial period.
AppMyGroup:
An app that connects you to an ASL interpreter. This app helps hearing people communicate clearly with deaf friends/family members. This app is not for medical/legal use and uses Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) certified interpreters only. If you’re tired of seeing your deaf family member/friend left out of group conversations, then try out this app! You download the app and create an account. It takes about 10 minutes to get connected to an interpreter and costs $1/minute.