Apple’s Conversation Boost Works, but It Makes Things Awkward

Back in the late aughts, someone down the hall from my office shut a metal door, and in my head, it made more noise than it should have. Something was wrong with my ears, and after a month of bouncing between doctors, an audiologist told me I'd lost about half the hearing in my right ear and picked up a bit of tinnitus to boot.

Thanks to the nature of the destruction caused by the nerve-eating virus I had contracted, even a custom-fit hearing aid didn't help. A lot of things I still hear just fine, and people often don't pick up that I'm half deaf on one side. Thankfully, and kind of amazingly, when I have headphones on, the music still sounds like it's coming straight down the pike—I don't even notice anything is missing until some Pink Floyd-style stereo effects kick in.

Noisy spaces, however, especially where sound bounces around a lot, can be a challenge. I'll ask to sit at one of the corners of a table to keep everyone I'm with in front of and to the left of me. To engage, I have to pay extra attention, staring right at each speaker. It's usually fine, but in a loud enough space it can be exhausting. As a result, I was excited to hear about the Conversation Boost feature built into Apple's $250 AirPods Pro headphones, which uses computational smarts and a directional microphone to help you “hear more clearly by focusing the sound on the person directly in front of you,” as the company claims.