Lexie B2 Plus OTC Hearing Aids Powered by Bose - Premium Wireless Charging Case, Rechargeable Hearing Aids with App Control, Self-Fit, Noise Reduction, Bluetooth Enabled Calls on iOS & Android (Gray)

Love them, greatly improved my hearing and very easy to use and follow directions giving.

BOSE used to be known for their quality and I used to be a loyal BOSE customer. You paid more for BOSE products but you knew you were getting a quality product in return. That, is no longer the case. BOSE cannot "do" software and just need to get out of the wireless speaker business and stick with wires. I have owned and used several Bose wireless speakers over the years (sounds bars, headsets and now hearing aides) and not one has worked for very long (over 6 months) before they won't connect to devices. It feels like forced obsolescence. Yet I bought their Hearing Aides thinking these might be different. Again, they worked fine for a couple months and same as all their speakers, they eventually stop connecting to devices (despite software updates). I estimate I have spent over $5,000 in Bose speaker products over the past five years (mostly sound bars for 4 TVs) and I have nothing to show for it today. BOSE simply will not take the time to create a decent software app for their speakers and unfortunately their hearing aides are no different. Bottom line, they worked fine for a few months. However today, I have to go through a 15-20 minute process of booting and rebooting the software to get the Bose Hearing Aides to connect to their OWN software application. Most often to no avail. Trust me, this is not a daily feature you want in a Hearing Aide.

Update - I'm ready to lower my rating to 3 stars. I have a SAmsung Galaxy 24S. totally up too date software. The app keeps losing connectivity with the aids. I have to take them in and out of the case and power up quickly or the bluetooth fails. And the app never saves the custom environments I create. I've created 5 so far and each time I log out and back in they are gone.I've had these about 3 weeks now. So easy to use once you get the app to work. I had to text chat with one of their experts to get the correct permissions for the app to work with my Android phone. Nowhere was that information in the manual.The manual could also use some rewriting. It would have been great to have the sections on how to charge and how to put in your ears, at the BEGINNING of the manual.LEXIE folks how about a Quick Start insert that says, first charge your aids until the white light stops blinking!! Second press bottom button for 5 seconds to turn on and insert in ears. Download app, allow the following permissions ...., and then connect by following the instructions in the app.And the app said it needed an update. The download never worked. Ended up going to the Google app store to get the update to install.I do love them now that I figured out how to navigate the app and customized the settings.

It is important to know that I have used hearing aids for 8 years, so I have experience with hearing support. There were two reasons I returned these hearing aids: 1) the feedback was so loud that other communications partners could hear it, my spouse found it particularly annoying and I found it very restrictive that I had to constantly monitor and adjust my movements to reduce the feedback (another burden on an elder already working with the diminished capacity for motor planning that comes with aging!); 2) there are initially some support contact options for the hearing aids, but long-term support needed to be paid for, one email I received indicated that it would cost me $9.99 a month to have continued "premier" support for these hearing aids, which adds to the cost of these devices. The sound quality was ok, not great, but adequate which for the price, I could have lived with as I didn't expect them to compare favorably with more expensive devices. For the two reasons described, I chose to return the devices.

The media could not be loaded. Review of Lexie B2 Plus OTC Hearing Aids Powered by Bose - Rechargeable Hearing Aids for Seniors, 18 Hour Wireless Charging Case, Hearing Aids with Bluetooth Enabled Calls On iOS, Hearing Aids (Light Gray) @ $999.00I have moderate hearing loss, with the right ear being the worse. I have tried several hearing “amplifiers” and a couple of them even claimed to be hearing “aids” but were obviously not. I had previously gone to Miracle Ear and had testing done and declined to buy their almost $10,000 hearing aids: that’s just not affordable to me. I did more research and narrowed my choices down to this Lexie B2 Plus and the Jabra Enhance 50. This Lexie is from Bose, a very reputable company that specializes in engineering sound quality products. The Lexie B2 did not have as good of reviews, but this Plus unit had better ones even though not as many reviews in total.I liked that these offer several nice features. Up to 18 hours of charged hearing aids on a 3-hour charge is good. It’s a nice charging case. I like that they are rechargeable. I don’t want to be buying and messing with changing batteries, which are relatively expensive. I have an iPhone, and this caters to the iPhone user more perhaps than Android whereas I can use these to get phone calls, but they do not stream music, which is sort of a disappointment. I like that these have an app to provide “audiologist-quality customization”, according to the documentation. I like having pre-set options for your environment and being able to customize 10 of my own. But automatic adjustments would be much nicer. Obviously, this would likely increase the cost of these. There are several pairs of ear domes to choose from for a “self-fit solution”. I really don’t like wearing things in my ears or behind them, but overall, the comfort level is not bad. They are relatively discreet. I would actually forget I was wearing them, and my daughter did not notice I was wearing them when I went to visit her. The documentation claims that Lexie hearing aids are the best OTC in the US, but I have nothing to compare these to as far as OTC ‘actual’ hearing aids.The app loaded quickly and connected to the hearing aids without any problems. The app is mostly user friendly. There are help files and links within the help files, as well as links to some videos. The app allows you to adjust the volume of the hearing aids, but not independently. You also adjust the treble, but I did not find that useful at all. The volume can be adjusted on the aids themselves, and the lower volume control turns them on and off. There are 4 “environments” to choose from, and each one automatically changes the settings (volume and treble) on the hearing aids. I tried all of these but did not find that they did a very good job of adjusting the hearing aids in a manner that improved what I was hearing, nor did it help to clarify voices. When watching TV I was mostly able to NOT use closed captioning. But that depended upon the program and whether or not I was watching satellite or streaming a program. I also found that they did not seem to maintain the settings. I would have them set, look at the levels in the app, use them for a bit and then look at the levels again, only to find that they had changed somehow.I took the hearing test on the app. In fact, I took the hearing test multiple times in an effort to improve the automatic settings. Every time I took the test, the settings were automatically set to a different setting than before no matter which domes I used. These arrived with what they call the closed domes (size #2) pre-installed. The tests are recommended to be taken with closed domes. There are 2 sets of domes sized #1, #2, & #3, that come with this (6 total). Each size has 1 set of closed domes and 1 set of open (they have holes around the circumference) domes. I tried the hearing test with sizes 2 and 3. Size #1 was so small they did not even touch the insides of the ear canal. I tried each of the other domes after the tests to see what seemed to work best. I finally settled on the ones that came pre-installed.The charger did a good job. It is a USB C charger. The hearing aids’ charge seemed to last 18 hours or a little more. There’s nothing on the outside of the charger to tell you that it’s working. When you open the charger, its white lights are lit whether the hearing aids are in the cradles or not. I suppose that this indicates that the charging case has power. You only get one charge of the hearing aids without the case plugged in and if it has a full charge. Otherwise, you must plan on charging the case and hearing aids at the same time. But it does seem to fully charge the aids in the reported 3 hours.This does not come with any type of case for just storing or drying the hearing aids. There is no room for drying capsules in the charging case while the hearing aids are cradled. The documentation that comes with these states that there are drying capsules included, but there are not. Don’t tell me there are when there are none!Did they work? To a degree they did help. But I found that all I seemed to do was readjust them. The ultimate test was when I visited family, which I was having so much trouble understanding my daughter even when she was sitting right next to me. Having these set to what should have been correct, I still had trouble understanding her. In these situations when I turned the volume up enough to hear her, it was too loud otherwise. Just walking across the floor, I could hear the creaking, but too loud. I can tell that these are more than just hearing amplifiers.It did stream calls to my hearing aids, but the sound was not in stereo, and it was poor quality. The sound was in the right ear only. When getting a call on my iPhone, I noticed that I had to choose on my phone where I wanted to hear the call (my phone, my phone’s speaker, or my Bose Lexie device). This was sort of a pain.I don’t think that these were working as they should. At one point the left one was crackling. I was still, not chewing or talking or doing anything, and it was just crackling away. Suddenly it stopped. I also do not think these have any noise cancelling capabilities. If they do, they’re not very adept. There is no way to upload any audiologist reports if you might already have one, which I did from Miracle Ear. Bose does not offer any kind of assistance with professional adjustments to the hearing levels or fittings of the domes. You are on your own for this.I ordered these after a friend that was helping me research OTC hearing aids suggested them. Plus, these were $200 to $400 less than the higher rated Jabra brand. That is a great deal of money to me in difference. Due to all of the problems these presented, I returned them. I will likely just order the Jabra and get the additional support, supplies, professional adjustments, and warranty, all for 3 years. The Bose Lexie do not offer this level of help.