LACE vs clEAR: What Happened to clEAR

There is no LACE-versus-clEAR decision left to make. clEAR, the training program built at Washington University in St. Louis, was relaunched as Amptify. In December 2024, Neurotone AI — the company behind LACE — announced it was acquiring Amptify and folding its content into LACE AI Pro, effective at the end of that year.

The web trail is easy to follow. We checked both addresses on August 12, 2026. clEAR's old address, clearworks4ears.com, forwards to Amptify, and Amptify forwards to neurotone.com. Neither one is a dead link, so nothing looks obviously wrong — you simply arrive somewhere with a different name on it. Older comparison articles are still in search results, which is why the question keeps coming up.

The signature idea was familiar voices. You could load recordings of the people you actually needed to hear — a spouse, a grandchild, the friend who mumbles — and the games trained on those instead of a studio cast. That idea did not die with the name; it moved into LACE AI Pro.

As Amptify, the program grew into a broader hearing health platform. By the time of the acquisition, Neurotone singled out its cochlear implant content and its communication strategies material as the pieces being brought into LACE AI Pro.

LACE has been around since the mid-2000s, and its published trials were run on those earlier versions — not on the current AI Pro app. The AI Pro version adapts difficulty to your performance across speech in noise, rapid speech, and memory-based exercises, and it added practice with recorded family voices — the idea clEAR was known for.

It runs on iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web, with both store listings updated in June 2026, and as of April 2026 it supports English, Spanish, French, German, and several other languages. Access is the catch: its own listing says you must be registered by a hearing care professional before you can log in. Neurotone publishes no consumer price; partner clinics list about $499 one-time.

If you were weighing either program, the path is the same: ask your hearing care professional about LACE AI Pro. If your provider includes it in your care at no extra cost, you get structured practice with someone tracking your progress.

If what drew you to clEAR was the familiar-voice training, ask specifically about the family-voice feature. That thread of clEAR's work — and its founder, who joined the LACE AI Pro team — now lives there.

Not everyone wants to book an appointment to start practicing. ReDi from MED-EL is free, is not tied to one brand of hearing device, and needs no registration. Angel Sound runs free in a browser. SoundSteps has a free version in the browser too, and the first week includes full access with no card.