High-Tech Details of Starkey Genesis AI Explained in New Podcast by Drs. Achin Bhowmik and David Fabry
A new Starkey Sound Bites episode released today addresses the 5-year journey to the recent launch of Genesis AI. According to Starkey, the new product began in 2017, when Achin Bhowmik, PhD, stepped into the role of Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Starkey. The former Intel Corporation executive and Starkey President and CEO, Brandon Sawalich, kept the project under wraps, secretly developing and testing the new technology for years. In the new podcast, Dr. Bhowmik shares the backstory with podcast host and Starkey Chief Innovation Officer, Dave Fabry, PhD. He also dives into the high-tech details of what sets Genesis AI hearing aids apart from the rest: they are built to mimic the brain.
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Achin Bhowmik, PhD, and David Fabry, PhD, at the recent launch of the Starkey Genesis AI hearing aid in Minneapolis.
“The brain is an amazing computational system—in fact, the most amazing computational system that we know of,” says Bhowmik. “At its core, you have a network of neurons that are heavily interconnected and then learn from the information that is thrown at it. When a kid is learning to recognize language, they're basically training that neural network. Copying a page from biology, the technology equivalent of that is a deep neural network built into the device. Well, there are two ways of doing that. One, you could just build it in a software, which is what most people have done so far. With Genesis AI, it was an opportunity for us to go one step further and build a hardware architecture where neurons are interconnected in a block on the chip itself.”
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The components inside the Starkey Genesis AI hearing aid.
According to Starkey, the all-new Neuro Processor within Genesis AI features the industry’s most advanced processor technology, which mimics the function of the central auditory system through a Deep Neural Network (DNN) on-chip accelerator. It is the smallest processor ever by Starkey, but also the most powerful with 6X more transistors. It is also loaded with 5X more computational memory and 10X the amount of non-volatile memory.
To listen to the full interview with Dr. Bhowmik, visit the Starkey Sound Bites website or find the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
