Health Tech: Bruce Sharpe On How Singular Hearing’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact In Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Dave Philistin

It’s not just about the technology. A solution has to be affordable, usable, maintainable, and accessible. Are you asking people to change their behavior? That’s hard. Early handheld devices failed because handwriting recognition wasn’t very good and people weren’t willing to adjust how they wrote so it would work.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bruce Sharpe, CEO of Singular Hearing and creator of the HeardThat app.

Bruce Sharpe has a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from the University of British Columbia. He started his career at a space sciences company near Vancouver, BC, and went on to a series of founder and executive roles at software startups in fields ranging from computer gaming to content management to video production. In recent years, he has returned to his technical roots by immersing himself in the world of AI and machine learning as applied to signal processing, and founded Singular Hearing to use these techniques to create products for hearing assistance.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I was one of four children raised by a single mother in southern Ontario, Canada. My father died when we kids were quite young — elementary school age. My mother had no particularly marketable skills, but she was determined to keep the family together and started a couple of fabric stores.

From an early age, I knew what I wanted to do in life, but it changed all the time: filmmaker, journalist, economist, medical researcher, physicist, and so on. I finally settled on an interest in mathematics long enough to get a Ph.D., but I knew as I was finishing my degree that I didn’t want a career in academia.

This was around the time of the first PCs. My wife and I bought one and together we wrote a program to help typeset my thesis. I fell in love with software development. Some fellow students and I wrote a utility program for an early version of the IBM PC. We had no idea how to take it to market, but we got acqui-hired and that was the springboard for a career in software across a wide range of industries with a technical slant, particularly signal processing.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Pretty much every career change I’ve had has been the result of pursuing a hobby interest and serendipity. My philosophy is, “If you do stuff, stuff happens.”

Example: When my day job was writing algorithms to analyze satellite images, on the side I was working on projects related to music — automatic recognition of sheet music, pitch analysis, etc. One day I was standing in line at a bookstore (this was pre-internet) waiting to buy a book on digital signal processing applied to music. The person in line behind me noticed the title, struck up a conversation, and a few weeks later I was heading up the R&D group at his company which was making sound cards for PCs. It was unplanned, unexpected, and great fun.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Well, first of all, my mother. Not only did I learn a lot about resilience, persistence, and grit from her, I got to see how a business was built up from scratch by watching and participating in what she did. Plus she was a complete nerd who loved gadgets and always had to experiment with the newest new thing. People who know me will recognize some family similarity there.

In my career, so many people helped me it’s hard to pick out just one. One of my managers at the space sciences company stands out though. He had much more confidence in me than I had in myself and gave me opportunities that I would never have imagined. He included all his direct reports in collaborative decision-making and it was a great business education to be a part of that. As I moved up the ranks I relied on what I learned in those early years a lot.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Go! Maybe you’ll meet someone.” This is advice that is usually given by a parent to a child in the context of finding a personal life partner. It worked that way for me, but it is also something I have applied to my professional life. I’m not that great at initiating events or creating occasions. So instead I force myself to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself. This doesn’t come naturally, but I rarely regret going instead of cocooning in my comfort zone at home. If you want interesting things to happen, you have to put yourself out there, one way or another.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. ABC = Always Be reCruiting. The right people make all the difference, especially in a startup where each person can have a huge impact. The top person I hired in my last company was someone I bumped into at a business networking event that we were both eager to escape from. It’s hard to scale up that way of recruiting, but if you always keep your antennae up to sense a hiring prospect, you’ll find key people in unexpected places.
2. Persistence and a drive to get to the finish line. When the physicist Ernest Rutherford was asked how he discovered the structure of the atom, he replied, “It was easy. I just thought about nothing else day and night for fifteen years.” It’s OK to be obsessed sometimes. My last company came about because I wrote a little software utility to help me with some hobby video editing. I could have left it at that, but I knew that others would find it useful. It was about a thousand times more work to package it up into a product for sale, but it ended up doing well in the market and led to a successful exit.
3. Give yourself the chance to get lucky. Luck seems to be a big part of anyone’s success, certainly it was for me, but you can’t win if you don’t play. That video editing utility I mentioned earlier had its marketing launch on almost the same day that Canon announced the first DSLR camera with a video mode. That was a hugely popular product that quadrupled the market for our product almost overnight. Pure luck, but we were in a position to benefit from it. You never know when your own trajectory will intersect the strategic direction of something bigger out there.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

Hearing loss is a very widespread problem and is growing. Left untreated, it can lead to a range of serious cognitive issues and reduced quality of life. There is a large industry of products and services for hearing assistance, and yet in many ways, it is a community that does not get enough love. We want to provide new types of solutions that are made available in new ways.

How do you think your technology can address this?

We make a smartphone app called HeardThat that helps people hear speech better in noise. It uses a class of techniques based on AI that represents a new approach to speech enhancement — noise is separated from speech and discarded. This is fundamentally different from noise filtering, active noise cancellation, or the many other techniques that have been tried and found wanting over the years.

Our product fills an important gap in the hearing assistance market by providing an affordable, powerful software product that uses the devices that people already have, in particular, their phones.

Hearing assistance has traditionally been provided as hardware, in devices: from early ear horns to modern hearing aids and implants. Wearable devices, as valuable as they are, are not smart enough to be able to know what is speech and what is noise. They don’t have the necessary processing power, battery life, or memory capacity. But smartphones have all that.

We think that increasingly software is where the most progress in hearing assistance is going to be made, particularly by using AI in the form of machine learning. We have such a solution that anyone can easily try today and which will get even better over time.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

Most people either have hearing problems themselves or someone close to them does. In my case, it was my father-in-law. Despite having worn hearing aids for years we could see him increasingly withdrawing from social situations — it was just too hard to try to hear with all the noise and commotion that is typical in settings like parties or at restaurants.

As we looked for solutions, I learned that this problem is very widespread and despite many advances in hearing assistive technology, had not been adequately addressed. Meanwhile, the world is getting noisier and hearing loss is affecting a larger percentage of the population all the time. New approaches are needed.

This inspired me to bring myself up to speed on the resurgence of AI based on deep learning and how it could be applied to hearing assistance. I formed Singular Hearing to make practical products based on these new, fundamental advances.

How do you think this might change the world?

AI will have a transformative impact on a whole range of businesses. In our case, it enables us to make software to solve problems that previously required specialized hardware. That changes the landscape completely. Software is more affordable than hardware. It can be updated frequently and gets better over time, much more quickly than hardware. It is easy to try before you buy, so you don’t have to commit to it, either with time or money, to find out whether you like it.

All the technology factors are going in the right direction for us: phones are getting more powerful, Bluetooth is getting faster and more efficient, and new AI algorithms are being developed all the time. Meanwhile, hearing loss is a growing problem because of an aging population, because the world is steadily getting noisier, and because of a younger generation that has grown up with access to loud music 24/7, right in their ears.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Some wonder if AI will result in some kind of robopocalypse where the robots take over and kill us all, but that is far-fetched and definitely not in the foreseeable future. There are much more realistic concerns that are relevant today. AI has many applications and some of those have an impact on people’s employment, education opportunities, ability to get a loan, or even how they are treated by the justice system. It is not hard to imagine that, applied thoughtlessly, bad things can happen. There are already well-documented examples of how existing biases and prejudices in society can be absorbed by AI models, which then end up reinforcing them.

AI as applied to hearing assistance doesn’t have that kind of negative potential, but there are some things to think about. We have to be careful to preserve the privacy of people using the product. That’s why we do all our processing right on the phone instead of sending recorded audio to the cloud, for example.

We often get asked if our product can be used to spy on people, by listening to them without their knowledge. The answer is no. The main reason is, we haven’t designed it to do that. The sort of extreme spy-listening scenarios that people are wondering about are not technologically possible today. But the software is getting more capable all the time and the community will need to be sure to deploy it in ways that are compatible with standard expectations of privacy.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1. Focus on the users. Don’t assume you know what’s best for them. Get out and talk to them, and watch them using your product. I guarantee there will be surprises. With our product we learned, for example, that even music playing lightly in the background can be a real problem for some people. We learned that some really don’t want to hear their own voice, and a pop-up screen that we thought was crystal clear was just confusing.

2. It’s not just about the technology. A solution has to be affordable, usable, maintainable, and accessible. Are you asking people to change their behavior? That’s hard. Early handheld devices failed because handwriting recognition wasn’t very good and people weren’t willing to adjust how they wrote so it would work.

3. Think about who you might be leaving out. Who is your product going to work for and who else could benefit? For example, in our work, we take into account that not everyone speaks English and not every English-speaker has an American accent.

4. Pick an important problem where you can make a difference. It’s going to be hard work so try to find something that is really interesting to you so you’ll stick with it. What I like about what we are doing is that it lies in the intersection of important problems, technical feasibility, business viability, and is in an area where we have appropriate skills and can have fun with it, while hopefully doing some good.

5. Start with a core of users who understand what you are trying to do and love it. Know that every day other people will tell you that what you are doing is not going to work, that no one will want it, and that it doesn’t solve the right problem. Take strength from knowing that every new technology has faced this, whether it was personal computers, bicycles, cell phones, light bulbs, and even umbrellas.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Some of the most challenging times humanity has ever faced lie ahead of us. So do some of our most exciting opportunities. We need the best and brightest to be focused on the right things. Too abstract? Then just look at it pragmatically. If the environment is better, it’s better for everyone, including you. If we remove barriers and open opportunities to all, more amazing people will have the chance to emerge and do the amazing things that will make everyone’s lives better. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Sundar Pichai. Google clearly understands the value of machine learning and they are showing an interest in health and fitness applications. But I’ll bet that the range of benefits they are considering is not as broad as it could be. They don’t have to do it all themselves, they have a platform that can enable a host of innovative startups (like us!) to do great things.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Subscribe to our blog on https://heardthatapp.com, or follow @heardthatapp on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.