Android 15 will offer better support for Hearing Aids

Android, being the phone operating system of choice for so many people worldwide, needs to cater to everyone, and that includes folks with hearing loss. The OS already has features like Live Captions, but the folks at Google are taking it a step further with Android 15. This new update will make hearing aids work even better with your phone.Hearing aids are like little helpers you wear in your ears that make sounds louder. A lot of those sounds come from your phone – think calls, videos, or music. That’s why hearing aids use Bluetooth to connect to your phone. But Bluetooth can drain a hearing aid’s battery, and no one wants that, especially if they rely on their hearing aids all day.

Up until now, there wasn’t a great way to stream audio from your phone to your hearing aids without using up a lot of battery. Big companies like Apple and Google made their own ways of doing it, but it wasn’t perfect. If one company made a change, it wouldn’t help people using the other company’s phones.

That’s where the new Bluetooth LE Audio comes in, as it is a standard way for devices to talk to each other that uses less battery. Android 15 will support this new standard, meaning more hearing aids will work seamlessly with Android phones.

As documented by Mishaal Rahman over at Android Authority, at Google’s big I/O event, the company showed off a new feature in Android 15 – a quick way to connect or disconnect your hearing aids. It also lets you tweak settings for things like Live Caption and adjust the hearing aid’s sound for different environments, like a noisy restaurant or a quiet park. You’ll even be able to see the battery level of your hearing aids right on your phone’s screen.

Slide shown during Google I/O pertaining to how Android 15 will support Hearing Aids