Jabra Hearing Innovation, Technology & Agility

How is your team integrating AI and ML into the product development process, and what specific improvements have you seen as a result?

It’s an exciting time for our product development teams in the world of AI, or more specifically, Gen AI. There now exists numerous Gen AI solutions available to us to help accelerate our development process and, more importantly, speed up and reduce manual effort with some of the more tedious aspects of our jobs. Our team is super excited about leveraging Gen AI solutions, and I’m so happy to be partnering with them to reap the benefits. Our engineering teams now have the ability to learn and gain expertise in new technologies much faster and with less effort than ever before. 

We were recently able to automate several time-consuming processes by asking for some help with a scripting language that our team wasn’t already familiar with. Our team was able to quickly generate and get an understanding of the required script using Gen AI much faster than learning it from scratch, and our entire department is now reaping the benefits of having the automation in place. Another example is using Gen AI to help us generate test cases and testing frameworks using our own requirements as inputs rather than manually creating test frameworks from scratch.

What strategies are you employing to ensure that your systems and processes keep up with the rapid advancements in AI and ML?

The Gen AI solution space is crowded. Our strategy for leveraging AI and ML includes an analysis of the market and selecting proposed solutions that best integrate with our existing product development processes and tools. We look at how a proposed Gen AI solution meets our requirements for data privacy and cybersecurity. As a healthcare company, data security, privacy and compliance are critical requirements for us, and not all AI solutions are going to be compatible with our needs. We will then develop a proof-of-concept to validate our proposed solution. 

Solutions such as built-in AI features of existing tools and platforms and those with straight-forward integrations with our existing data platforms will undoubtedly get a higher priority than others. AI solutions are only as good as the data they have access to; ease of integration with existing data systems is a key component of our strategy. Leveraging LLMs on top of our own data is extremely powerful. Fostering a culture of continuous improvement is key to our strategy to identify AI opportunities; weighing the benefits, fit with existing systems and requirements and cost are key to our decision-making.

Can you share some examples of how AI and ML has directly contributed to enhancing your product line or accelerating time to market?

The highest priority use of AI and ML for us in product improvement is to leverage these technologies in combination with the breadth and depth of data that we’ve collected over the years, such as hearing aid usage, diagnostic and performance data, fitting information and customer experience information. Utilizing Gen AI and ML on top of our wealth of hearing data allows us to improve outcomes for our customers. It would enable our users to hear the world around them more effectively by optimizing their experience, proactively suggesting changes to programming in our Jabra Enhance Select mobile app, fitting and suggesting maintenance based on a deep understanding of the data and utilizing the predictive capabilities of ML. 

By recognizing certain patterns of performance data, our ML could recommend a fitting change with a high degree of confidence, which would dramatically improve an individual’s ability to recognize human speech much better in a noisy environment. I see a huge opportunity to leverage predictive analytics and ML to significantly boost our mission of leveraging technology to empower people with hearing loss to connect with their world.