It’s too loud for me to hear inside the Cupertino coffee bar, but Achin Bhowmik says it doesn’t bother him. He’s got a superpower, he says. If I look closely—very closely—I can see the tiny plastic tubes reaching from his ear canals to small devices hidden behind his ears. The hearing aids are running machine-learning algorithms that continuously monitor his “acoustic environment” to help him hear what he wants to hear. In the coffee shop, the devices decide this is a “speech in noise” situation, and automatically dampen the sound of background chatter and espresso machines, and focus four directional mics (two in each device) to amplify my voice instead.

But that’s not the cool part. While other high-end hearing aids have included similar technology in recent years, Starkey Hearing Technologies’ new Livio AI hearing aids also count your steps and track how much time you spend talking to people rather than in isolation. They can detect when the wearer has fallen, and with an impending software update will be able to notify a loved one or 911. They can even listen to another language and whisper a near real-time translation in your ear, Star Trek style. While some or all of these features have been available in consumer devices known as “hearables,” they’ve never before been packed into a hearing aid—a government-approved medical device that has to be small, comfortable, and include batteries that last for days rather than hours.

If Starkey delivers on all these promises, the Livio AI, which Bhowmik unveiled last week at Starkey’s headquarters near Minneapolis, could bust the musty old hearing-aid industry out of its niche of selling to … well, musty old people. Today, only 50 million of the estimated 466 million people with some hearing loss use hearing aids. By adding other capabilities, Starkey is hoping to finally make it OK for all those untreated people to buy a product they haven’t wanted to admit they need. It’s a page out of the Apple playbook. “When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, he totally disrupted a perfectly good cell-phone market by making it into a multipurpose device” that combined a phone, an internet communicator and iPod into one product, says Bhowmik, Starkey’s chief technology officer. “What Apple did to the smartphone, we’re going to do to the hearing aid.”

That’s big talk, but Starkey has as good a chance as anyone to pull it off, and the most reason to try. The 5,000-person company is one of five firms—the other four are based in Europe—that sell more than 90 percent of the world’s hearing aids. It may be the most innovative of the lot, having introduced everything from a 90-day trial to all-but-invisible in-the-ear-canal models. If any company is going to figure out how to grow the highly profitable, $7 billion-a-year hearing aid business, Starkey isn’t a bad bet.

New Rivals Emerge

Trouble is, Starkey may be competing with some much tougher rivals before long. As personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa change how consumers access information, Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies are working on ear-based devices of their own. Apple is interested in creating “hearable”-style products with sensors to track various health metrics, say people familiar with Apple’s thinking. Amazon is determined to free Alexa from the smart speaker and get her into an in-ear device, where she can fill your shopping orders wherever you are, according to people familiar with its plans. Google has various projects to do the same for search and other services.

The giants’ interest coincides with passage last year of the Over-The-Counter Hearing Aid Act, which will create a new class of hearing aids that won’t be regulated as medical devices, for people with mild to medium hearing loss. That will free others to market sexy new ear-based products as hearing aids---for a lot less money and less hassle than a conventional hearing aid. Today, you need to be tested by an audiologist, who charges $3,500 on average for his service and the hearing aid. Backers of the law, which will go into effect by mid-2020, expect over-the-counter models to be available at big-box retailers and pharmacies and pretty much anywhere else that you can buy cheap reading glasses today, for $500 or less.