The Sunday Read

Margaret isn't the type of woman who likes to make a fuss. Sixty-eight years old, retired schoolteacher, still tends her own garden and still shows up early to bowls on Thursdays. So when she tells this story, she tells it the way she tells most things — plainly, without much drama.

"It was my granddaughter, actually. She's seven. She asked me a question at the dinner table and I just smiled and said 'that's nice, love' — which is what you say when you didn't quite catch it and you're hoping it wasn't important. She looked at me a bit funny and said, 'Nana, you always say that.' And that stuck with me."

She says it wasn't one big moment. It was smaller than that — restaurants getting harder to enjoy, the television creeping up in volume until her husband started leaving the room, phone calls where she'd ask people to repeat themselves twice before giving up and pretending she'd heard.

"I wasn't deaf. I want to be clear about that. I just wasn't catching the middle of sentences anymore — especially if there was any noise around. Everyone just sounded a bit further away than they used to."

Like a lot of people her age, Margaret had assumed the next step was a hearing clinic — an appointment, a wait list, and a price tag she'd heard could run into the thousands. "A friend of mine paid something like five grand for hers. I just filed the whole idea under 'later.'"

What actually got Margaret moving wasn't a doctor's suggestion — it was her daughter, who'd been reading about the shift happening in hearing technology. Over the past few years, a category of devices has opened up in Australia and other markets: over-the-counter hearing aids, designed for adults noticing everyday difficulty with speech and background noise, available without a clinic visit or a prescription.

"She showed me the site, I read through it a few times, honestly a bit skeptical," Margaret says. "But there was a trial period, so I thought — what's the actual risk here."

She settled on a pair from Audivia, an Australian-supported brand making OTC hearing devices — the Wave Lite — which use AI-based processing to help separate voices from background noise, rather than just making everything louder the way she remembers her father's old hearing aid doing. The pair comes with a portable USB-C charging case that Margaret now keeps in her coat pocket.

"The app walks you through a sound check first, which felt a bit like an eye test but for your ears. Then it just... sets itself. I'm not a technology person, and I got through it in about fifteen minutes at my kitchen table."

Margaret is careful not to oversell it. "I'm not going to tell you I hear like I'm twenty-five again. That's not what this is." What she does say is that certain everyday moments got noticeably easier — the school pickup line with her granddaughter, ordering at a busy café, hearing her phone ring from the other room instead of missing calls entirely.

She also mentions being able to stream phone calls directly through the devices, and switching between what the app calls "restaurant mode" and "outdoor mode" depending on where she is — something that surprised her, since she wasn't expecting a hearing aid to behave a bit like a pair of wireless earphones.

Margaret's takeaway, when asked what she'd tell someone in her position a year ago: "Don't wait for someone else to point it out to you the way my granddaughter did. If you're finding yourself asking people to repeat themselves, or the telly's louder than it used to be — it's worth just looking into it. It's not the commitment I thought it was going to be."

For readers who'd rather compare options directly through an established hearing aid manufacturer first, Phonak also publishes its full Australian hearing aid range on its official site — worth a look if you want a broader picture before deciding what's right for you.