Built by someone who’s hard of hearing
I’ve had bilateral sensorineural hearing loss since childhood. I wear hearing aids, and I’ve spent years re-asking questions that were already answered because I genuinely did not hear. Samioo came from wanting a clearer picture of when and where that happens in everyday life.
Audiograms are essential for hearing evaluation, but real listening difficulty often appears in restaurants, cars, and ordinary conversation. That gap between the clinic and daily life is what Samioo is trying to study.
Grounded in prior research
A 2025 arXiv preprint showed that explicit hearing-difficulty moments, including direct requests for repetition, can be identified in conversational audio.
Samioo also studies contextual re-asks: later questions that appear to revisit information shared earlier. That is a research-stage extension under evaluation, and ordinary confirmation or conversational grounding may produce similar patterns.
Current evidence boundary
Prior work supports studying explicit hearing-difficulty moments. Samioo is evaluating whether a broader set of conversational patterns can provide useful additional context.
Our research approach
Real conversations, reviewed carefully
The public method is intentionally simple: observe potential moments, examine their context, and report uncertainty instead of forcing a conclusion.
Study hearing in natural conversation
Restaurants, cars, homes, and familiar voices provide context that a controlled test cannot recreate.
Review potential gaps in context
A repetition request or later re-ask can have several explanations, so the surrounding conversation matters.
Learn with hard-of-hearing participants
Consented real-world contributions help the research examine listening experiences missing from normal-hearing conversation data.
Why participation matters
Real-world conversational recordings from hard-of-hearing people are scarce in existing research resources. Normal-hearing conversation data can help test false-positive behavior, but it cannot establish how these moments appear for hard-of-hearing people.
Consented participant recordings help Samioo evaluate what is useful, what is ambiguous, and what should never be presented as a finding. The goal is to build something that helps people and audiologists discuss everyday listening with better context.
Want to contribute?
Participants receive a free, carefully reviewed research report. Every consented conversation helps move the research forward.