Discontinued Hearing Training Programs

Almost none of these were built as businesses. Most came from a hearing device maker as a free extra, from a university lab on grant money, or from a small team that got acquired. When the attention moves on, there is nobody left whose job is the next update.

The first symptom is usually that the app goes static — a year or two with no updates, though it still opens fine. A new phone breaks something. The store listing quietly disappears, and eventually the website starts forwarding somewhere else. There is rarely an announcement at any step.

People still recommend apps in this space that have been dead for years — we kept running into it in our own research. LACE comes up and the reference is “hearing apps we love,” an article from 2020. Most of these apps stayed static for a long time before they went — no updates was the tell — and the lists never caught up. That is why there is a checked-on date at the top of this page.

Hear Coach is the one people ask about most. Starkey’s set of listening games is off both app stores — each listing returns “not found” — and Starkey’s own page for it lands on an error. No reason was ever published. Our full write-up covers what it did and what fills its place.

Sound and Way Beyond is the oldest name on the list — Cochlear’s desktop program, built around 2009. Nothing marked its retirement; the support page just started returning “page not found” one day. A disc or a download link from years back now points at nothing, and Cochlear’s current adult pages carry printable exercises instead.

ReadMyQuips was different — lipreading practice built on short film clips. Its domain no longer resolves and the app is not in the store. Its maker, Sense Synergy, is still trading, so this is a product that ended, not a company.

clEAR is the strange one: it did not die so much as change names twice. Nancy Tye-Murray’s team built it at Washington University in St. Louis; it became Amptify, and at the end of 2024 Neurotone folded Amptify into LACE AI Pro. The research and the familiar-voice idea carried over. The names did not — you cannot sign up for clEAR or Amptify anymore, and both old addresses forward to neurotone.com.

Three programs that people often assume are dead are not, and it is worth saying so plainly.

Angel Sound is still free and still available. The address printed on a lot of older clinic handouts stopped answering, which is where the confusion starts, but the program moved and its current home works. Speech Banana, from Johns Hopkins, also still works — its website, its iPad apps and its web versions were all live when we checked. WordSuccess, from Advanced Bionics, is free and still in the app stores, though its listings have not been updated since the middle of 2024, so treat it as finished rather than growing.

You cannot predict which program will still be here in a year. A couple of minutes of checking tells you most of what you need to know.

And if the one you were handed has gone, you have not missed a step and you have not done anything wrong. Pick another and carry on. Telling whoever gave you the list is worth two minutes — most clinics want to know, and most have no way of finding out on their own.

SoundSteps makes a listening practice app — a maintained one, with a free version that runs in any browser — so this is not a neutral document and it is fair to weigh it accordingly. Two things to judge it on. Every status above was checked directly on a dated day, so anything wrong here can be caught and corrected. And the programs that still work are named as still working, the free ones that compete with us included.

If something listed as gone starts working again, or we have a detail wrong, we would rather hear about it than let this page go stale like the ones it describes.