Hearoes Review: Listening Practice for CI Users

Hearoes comes from Games 4 Hearoes in Australia, working with audiologists and speech pathologists at hospitals. The design is game-first: activities are framed as play, not drills.

The content is organized into modules that climb from raw sound awareness toward speech. Environmental Sounds covers everyday audio like kitchen sounds, farm sounds, and music. Introduction to Words works on pitch and syllables. Vowels and Consonants trains those sounds at the start and end of words. Understanding Sentences runs short everyday scenes, from video clips that support lip-reading up to audio with background noise.

Most listening apps assume you can already follow words. Hearoes does not. If you are newly activated and the world still sounds like noise, its early modules — everyday sounds, pitches, syllables — meet you where you are. That entry point is rare, and it is the app's best feature.

It is also current. Both store listings were updated in July 2026, and the hospital collaboration shows in how the ladder is ordered. The game framing keeps short sessions from feeling like homework.

The ladder tops out at sentences. Once you can follow its everyday scenes with background noise, there is nowhere higher to climb inside the app — no long conversations or stories to graduate into.

A few smaller cautions. Most content sits behind the subscription. It is English-only, with no web version for practicing on a computer. Its own surfaces also disagree about how many activities it holds — the App Store, the website, and Google Play each state a different count — so treat any single number as soft. And some users report playback bugs, which is a real problem in an app you use by ear.

Hearoes fits new implant users in the earliest stages, and anyone who wants listening practice to feel like a game. Give it a few weeks of steady use before you judge it.

When sentences start to feel steady, move to longer material. ReDi from MED-EL and WordSuccess from Advanced Bionics are both free and work with any brand. SoundSteps — our app, so read this knowing who wrote it — continues the ladder past sentences into conversations and stories, with background noise you adjust yourself. It runs in any browser with a free version.