The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. Being able to hear is quite obviously critical to my job. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost that ability, but one Oregon woman has turned her hearing loss into a business. Today on the show, you’ll meet a local entrepreneur who has turned this challenge into an enterprise opportunity that she wants to share with other people who struggle with their hearing. She has relied on a companion to help her understand and react to things she couldn’t hear, which she calls her hearing buddy. Now she’s developed an app called Hearing Buddy that does similar work. Then, at the end of the show, we’ll check in with our local reporter about the contentious race in the 4th Congressional District.
Dunne: Lilly Seay and Scott Krager, co-founders of Hearing Buddy, thanks to you both for coming on.
Both: Yeah, thanks so much for having us.
Dunne: Lilly, I’m going to start with you, and Scott, you can answer too. Let’s talk about being here in Oregon. Are you native Oregonians? Did you move here? How did you get to the Beaver State?
Lilly Seay: Yeah, I’m actually from Oklahoma, and I moved to Oregon about six years ago. I’m very much a hiker, so it’s pretty much the best place to live for hiking, and I’ve loved hiking my way through Oregon.
Scott Krager: I grew up here. I grew up in Clackamas, and we live near the river now in St. Johns, really close to Forest Park. We just love being outdoors and enjoying everything the Northwest has to offer.
Dunne: I imagine it’s quite a different environment from Oklahoma. We have lots of mountains and trees and rivers and all that, right, Lilly?
Seay: Yes, it’s so beautiful here.
Dunne: No offense to Oklahoma whatsoever, but it certainly is a wonderful place. Lilly, talk about your own experience with hearing loss, how you’ve had to deal with it and perhaps overcome the challenges of being hearing impaired.
Seay: Yeah, I’ve had moderate hearing loss my entire life, and with moderate hearing loss, you have some struggles and challenges in everyday conversation. Let’s say I’m sitting across the table from someone. I might only hear about 50% of what they say, and if someone is more than 6 feet away from me, I won’t hear them at all. So I spend a lot of time in conversations asking people to repeat themselves. A few things have helped me a lot. A few years ago, I started using hearing aids. I actually use AirPods Pro as hearing aids, and that was really life-changing for me. In some environments, hearing aids aren’t enough, and that’s when I use Hearing Buddy’s live captions to help me follow along with conversations a little better.
Dunne: OK, and we’ll talk about that. Given the challenges you’ve had to deal with, what was your inspiration for wanting to find a better way to help yourself and others who have partial hearing or hearing challenges?
Seay: Yeah, I’m an engineer, and I’ve always wanted to build a hearing accessibility app. But the real pain point for Hearing Buddy came when I took an in-office job as an engineering manager. I was in charge of training all the new engineers, so I would be in very large conference rooms all day, and my engineers would ask me questions from across the room, and I just could not hear them. It made my job really stressful. So Hearing Buddy started as a way to make my job more accessible to me. And what’s really cool is that a year after launch, we’re getting feedback from our users on how they use it at their jobs to be more productive.
Krager: One of our users works at a machine shop, and it’s kind of loud, so they keep their phone open so they know when the coworker next to them says their name. They see a flash on the phone and get a little tap on the wrist when someone says their name. It’s been very rewarding to hear how people use it in different environments.
Dunne: Lilly, before we get into the Hearing Buddy app you’ve developed, talk about the human hearing buddy you relied on before you were able to develop this application.
Seay: Yeah, I’ve actually been using the term hearing buddy for about a decade. At a certain point with my hearing loss, I realized I actually needed someone to help me. The easiest scenario is to have someone relay questions to me or tap me on the shoulder if someone else wants to get my attention. Usually that person has been my best friend or my partner, someone who feels extremely safe, nonjudgmental and patient to me. Scott’s my real-life hearing buddy. Since he can’t be with me 24/7, we decided to make the Hearing Buddy app together, so that I’ll always have support for my hearing loss.
Dunne: Both of you, weigh in on this. Talk about the development of Hearing Buddy. Lilly, you said you’re an engineer. How did you harness your engineering training to develop Hearing Buddy?
Seay: Actually, Scott developed the first version of the app, so I’ll let him talk about that.
Krager: Yeah, a year ago, Lilly was at Apple’s annual developer conference, and they announced a big improvement in voice-to-text technology. I was at home, she was at the conference, and I was like, “OK, I’ve got to do something to impress her here.” I had a couple of days, so I spent them with no sleep, just hacking away at building the first version of the app. When she came home, I showed it to her, and it was a little bit of the embodiment of the in-person concept she’d had. A couple of months later, she left her engineering job, and we’ve been working on it together since January. Something we’re currently working on is getting Hearing Buddy ready for the iPhone Duo. The iPhone Duo has so many new screen configurations that we’ve created a brand-new captioning experience. We’re really excited to see how our users use Hearing Buddy on the iPhone Duo and how it makes our lives more convenient.
Dunne: So how does it work? I know our audience doesn’t have the benefit of visuals, but describe what Hearing Buddy looks like and how it works.
Seay: Yeah, the app has been designed to be really easy to use. When you open the app, all you have to do is press one big button to tell your buddy to start listening, and your buddy will transcribe your conversation. It will give you a summary of the conversation every minute, and if someone asks you a question or says your name, it will give you a little tap on the wrist. What’s really awesome is that we’ve designed the app to work completely offline, so all of these features work without internet. We really wanted the app to be accessible in every environment. I was actually using Hearing Buddy on the summit of South Sister when I hiked it. I was up on the summit chatting with some people using Hearing Buddy, and it worked great. There was no internet up there, and it still helped me a lot.
Dunne: That’s a great example. For people who’ve been to South Sister, it can be very windy and hard to hear, even for people who have normal hearing. Does the app work in situations like that, where there’s a lot of ambient noise? And Lilly, you described how sometimes you can’t hear in very crowded places. Does Hearing Buddy allow you to overcome those ambient noise challenges?
Seay: It does help with the ambient noise challenge. On the summit, for example, it’s so windy that when I have my hearing aids in, they actually amplify the wind. So sometimes hearing aids can be unhelpful in a situation where captions can get much better dictation, because I can hold my phone closer to the people who are talking. It does help me pick up conversations in really noisy environments, or when there’s a noise my hearing aids amplify a lot and I can’t hear over it. That’s where the live captions and Hearing Buddy help me a lot.
Krager: One other helpful thing we designed for is support for external microphones and external inputs. A deaf influencer shared that they worked on film sets, and on a film set, you’re usually using a radio. Radios don’t always have the best audio, so we made sure we could support an analog input from the radio into Hearing Buddy. It can work totally offline and take the radio input, and then you can see the transcription from the radio. The ability to change the input and have some flexibility helps with some of the challenges you get from different environments.
Dunne: OK. Again, this is a question for both of you, but probably more for Lilly. What’s your hope for how it will improve the lives of people like you who have hearing challenges?
Seay: Yeah, hearing loss is a spectrum, and different environments require different tools. My goal with Hearing Buddy has always been to make as many environments accessible as possible. An example of this is a caption-sharing feature we launched a few months ago. Now a speaker can share their captions with an entire room. That feature has helped make classrooms more accessible. It also improved caption accuracy in really large rooms, like the training rooms I was in with my engineers. Caption sharing helps improve the accuracy when the speaker is really far away. We are engineers, and we find it really fulfilling to get feedback from the hearing loss community and design specific solutions for the environments they live in and have conversations in.
Dunne: OK, my last question for you: Where can people go to find out more about it, get it and find all the information they need?
Seay: Yeah, Hearing Buddy is free to download on the App Store. We have an all-new caption experience launching Oct. 23 alongside the iPhone Duo, and you can find us on social media at Hearing Buddy. I share a lot of my personal hearing loss journey and tips to help the community on our social media.
Dunne: That’s great. Lilly Seay and Scott Krager, co-founders of Hearing Buddy, I really want to thank you both for coming on and talking about this very interesting app.
Both: Thank you so much.
Dunne: There’s been a lot of heated rhetoric in the race for the 4th Congressional District. Our reporter joins us now to talk about it: KLCC reporter Rebecca Hansen-White. Rebecca, it’s always good to see you in studio. How are you?
Rebecca Hansen-White: I’m doing well. It’s always good to be here.
Dunne: You’re our lead reporter on probably the most high-profile race in our community: the race for the 4th Congressional District between incumbent Val Hoyle and challenger Monique DeSpain. We were talking off mic, and it really seems like there’s a lot of heat being thrown back and forth in this election. Is that how you read it?
Hansen-White: I do feel a little bit that way. I’ve covered a lot of races, and the higher-profile races do have a little more at stake, and people do accuse each other of things more. You see that in the governor’s race, too. It’s maybe unwise to do that in a local race. I think in part, in both this race and the governor’s race, when you have a rematch, you have things that infuriated both candidates two years ago getting recycled and coming back. It has felt like that talking to both of these candidates. There’s also a third person in the race, from the Pacific Green Party. But it has felt like that.
Dunne: I think that’s a great point. This is a rematch, so I’m wondering, are there new accusations and invective being hurled back and forth, or is it a recycling of the same talking points from last time? Is there something in this particular campaign where you’re like, OK, this is new, this is a new point one candidate is accusing the other of?
Hansen-White: I feel like it’s the same kind of worn-down grooves, with maybe some different issues. I talked about this in our story that’s online right now. Val Hoyle has been talking about how two years ago, Monique DeSpain was nominated by the Constitution Party, a very conservative political party that actually no longer exists as of this year because it didn’t have enough members. Hoyle is arguing that because DeSpain accepted the party’s nomination and worked with them, she does want to outlaw abortion and support other things the Trump administration supports that a lot of people in Oregon have shown they don’t. DeSpain has sent her a cease-and-desist letter over that and has said she’s lying. One notable point in my story is that a lot of Republicans in Oregon, especially those running for Congress, have gotten the endorsement of Oregon Right to Life, and Monique DeSpain actually has not. She’s one of two Republicans out of seven running for Congress this year who did not get that endorsement.
Dunne: OK, the political dynamics have changed a bit. Last time, President Trump won, and Republicans secured control of the House and Senate. This time around, there’s been a lot of reporting about a potential blue wave. Is DeSpain trying to distance herself from the president, given what looks like it could be a change in leadership, at least in the House?
Hansen-White: Yeah, I would say sort of, and I think there are a couple of things that are pretty different from last time. We’ve got the potential blue majority, which is something Rep. Hoyle is very excited about and looking forward to, and she has a whole lot of plans. In terms of candidate Monique DeSpain trying to distance herself from the president, I asked her a question following this line of thought when I had her in here for a one-on-one conversation. What she said was that she will not support anything that goes against the laws of Oregon. She says she will not vote to ban mail-in voting. She will not vote to ban abortion or do anything to stop same-sex marriage. That is where she has outlined a position for herself: She believes in states’ rights and local control, and as a member of Congress, she will not vote for anything that goes against those principles. The new ground I have noticed in this race, which wasn’t really a conversation when I covered it two years ago, is the conversation about AI.
Dunne: Hmm. Well, let’s go there, because the backbone of AI is data centers, and in this state, the governor has called for a pause. What are each candidate’s positions on data centers and AI?
Hansen-White: Yeah, I started noticing this in the race because both Tina Kotek and Val Hoyle have been the target of a lot of ads saying all of these data centers are their fault and that they support the people profiting off of this. After seeing those kinds of ads, I reached out to all the candidates in the race to ask what they really believe about data centers. Val Hoyle has said she believes AI and data centers need to be regulated, that we need ground rules and some protections to make sure it’s not state by state deciding what is legal. I also asked Monique DeSpain, who has been making ads attacking Val Hoyle specifically about this, and her viewpoint was very much in that same vein of local control. I asked whether she wants to see Congress regulate this, and I didn’t really get a yes on that. Her answer was to just leave it up to the states to decide. The third candidate in the race, Pacific Green candidate Justin Filip, wants to ban data centers, no AI. I think he’s concerned that if regulations are too friendly to the industry, they’re going to stop states from being able to protect themselves.
Dunne: OK. What does the latest polling suggest about this race? Is it Hoyle’s to lose because she’s in a blue state and a blue district? We’ve seen polling in the governor’s race, which seems to be very tight. What’s your sense of how this race is shaping up?
Hansen-White: Yeah, I think every election since Peter DeFazio retired has been a little bit different, and the district itself is a little different. If you remember, after the 2020 redistricting, Peter DeFazio announced he was going to retire. The district got redrawn so the southern Oregon part was a little smaller, and I think that essentially made the district just a little bit bluer. The past two elections have been viewed as ones where this district could potentially flip. When I looked at reporting from the Cook Political Report, which is a nonpartisan newsletter, they have this district as solidly Democratic. So right now, the polling looks like Hoyle is going to win if you go off of that. But polling is one of those things that sometimes really depends on certain factors. I try to talk to people and focus on who’s in front of me, and to be careful about relying too much on polling and taking things as a given.
Dunne: Yeah. Another big issue, one I think everybody in our community talks about, is homelessness. Can you talk a little bit about each candidate’s position on the issue and potential solutions?
Hansen-White: Yeah, we talked about this a little bit when I had each of the candidates in here. Monique DeSpain was very focused on her sense that a lot of money is being spent on this issue but we’re not necessarily getting results, so I think she’d really like more accountability measures to make sure that people on the street who are sick in some way are the focus of those efforts. When I talked to Justin Filip, his view was that we need to be doing more. I think he has been working with some shelters in recent years. When I talked to Val Hoyle, she pointed me toward work she has been doing on the 21st Century Road to Housing Act. That was a big law that just passed. The president wouldn’t sign it, but it became law anyway because it was bipartisan and something everyone wanted. There are so many different housing programs, subsidies and tax credits in there that I think she’s really hoping will get at some of the root causes of homelessness, which is our very high housing costs in Oregon. I think there’s going to be some money and programs in there for affordable housing, but also workforce housing. Our conversation focused on that work she’s been doing, and I don’t think she sees herself as done yet on housing and trying to get more options built.
Dunne: OK. Well, we’ll see how it all shapes up on election night and perhaps the days after. Rebecca Hansen-White covers politics and so many other things for us here at KLCC. Rebecca, thank you so much.
Hansen-White: Thank you.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Monday on the show, we’ll be joined by an editorial writer at The New York Times who has written a piece about how the city of Denver seems to be cracking the code on solving homelessness and what the Mile High City could teach us here in Oregon. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
