Samsung’s Galaxy Buds are about to get a lot more useful for people with hearing loss. The company says its wireless earbuds—at least newer ones—will soon serve as over-the-counter hearing aids, thanks to new FDA clearance.
Samsung isn’t rolling the feature out until later this year, and it will be available only to those with the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro, but it’s a significant step for people who need help hearing and also in keeping up with Apple’s AirPods, which have had FDA clearance as a hearing device since 2024.
Similar to AirPods, the Galaxy Buds’ hearing aid feature is meant for people with mild to moderate hearing loss who are over 18. The wireless earbuds will support the feature through Samsung’s app, where users are able to take a hearing test that can apparently offer a “medical-grade” assessment of your hearing in five minutes. After taking the test, users will get a grade for each ear, describing whether their hearing loss is mild, moderate, severe, or profound.
Samsung says that its hearing aid feature will be useful for high frequencies in particular, which should make it capable of capturing “surrounding whispers and distant voices,” two areas where people with hearing loss typically struggle.
While over-the-counter hearing aids are objectively a good thing, since they keep costs down and expand access to lots of people with a certain level of hearing loss, using earbuds as hearing aids does have limitations. Battery life, for example: These don’t exactly last all day. Both the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro and the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro are rated for just seven hours of use when active noise cancellation (ANC) is disabled.
For those who don’t need hearing aids all day, every day, though, a pair of Galaxy Buds could be more than enough, and it could be a big win for people who already own Samsung’s wireless earbuds.
