Oso AI Earbuds 4

Wireless Earbuds Are Going Off the Rails Thanks to AI

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There are many wireless earbuds available in the world. I’m no genie or god, so I can’t tell you Absolutely How many, but I’m just going along Very. And looking at that volume, you’re probably assuming there’s a lot of redundancy, which is absolutely true… to a degree. Regardless of how many pairs of interchangeable midrange active noise cancellation (ANC) wireless earbuds exist, things are going completely and completely off the rails. I’ll give you one guess as to why. Yep, that’s it… you know the answer.

If you guessed AI, congratulations, you’ve read at least one tech story this year. Possibly a Gizmodo one.

AI, like every other gadget on this increasingly toxic planet, is finding its way into more and more pairs of your wireless earbuds, and the results have been interesting. It appears that most pairs of AI-focused wireless earbuds are trained on one thing specifically: transcription. Like this Oso AI Earbuds pair that I reviewed earlier this year, advocates of AI wireless earbuds have become convinced that you’ll want to walk around recording everything everyone says all the time. Hey, maybe you do! And if that’s the case, go ahead and shoot me your name and face picture so I can make sure to follow what I say around you.

Nothing Ear A Wireless Earbuds
Nothing’s Year A Chat was one of the first to integrate GPT, and since then, things have gotten pretty crazy. © Raymond Wong/Gizmodo

Most AI wireless earbuds like this offer the ability to record and transcribe in a companion app, so you’ll never forget anything again. On the one hand, that ability can be useful for meetings or organization, or if you’re a journalist like me and need to capture what people say for work purposes. On the other hand, you can definitely pick up your phone instead of buying a brand new gadget.

To compound that conversation, some are pushing the envelope even further with AI wireless earbuds that claim to offer LTE connectivity. For example, this pair from Kickstarter, called the Moboi TikNote Pods, claims to be the first AI notetaking wireless earbuds with a 4G mobile connection. Why Would you like such a thing? Well, you probably don’t, but if you did, it would be because you could theoretically use them for AI transcription and summarization without relying on the phone. You heard it here first: You can throw your phone straight in the trash.

Transcription Buds may be the most popular iteration of AI wireless audio, but they’re not the only one. Some startups are taking things even further. Why stop at AI features? Why not go full-on AI gadget by jamming an “agent computer” into your ear? This company, called iyO, is trying to do just that, and the results look pretty ridiculous. iyO’s gadget, the iyO One, consists of not only an ear tip that’s supposed to be custom-fit to your ear, but also a tri-driver audio system, and then, the grand finale, an “audio computer disk,” which it claims has processing, memory, and a microphone all built-in.

When iyO says it wants you to put a computer in your ear, it seems to mean just that. The iyO One apparently has a 4nm quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 chip, an option for LTE, and 32GB of LPDDR4 RAM. What are you supposed to do with all this? The same kinds of things you get to do with other AI wireless earbuds, including transcription, translation, and searching the web. As a nice touch, iyO also says that its AI Wireless Earbuds (or Earbuds Cingular, I guess) can give you super hearing thanks to lots of beamforming mics and (duh) AI.

That said, things are on the rise in the world of AI wireless earbuds, which makes it odd for London-based audio/phone company Nothing and ChatGPIT to include their in-ear series buds in 2024. Big companies like Google are also getting in on the action peripherally with features like the hands-free Gemini Live, though they haven’t yet gone full-on in remarketing the Pixel Buds as “AI earbuds.”

It’s hard to be surprised about such a trend given that AI is so popular these days (for better and often for worse), but it’s also unique in how far the needle has been pushed. If I were a betting man, I’d bet you should also buckle up, because as long as AI remains a popular term, you’ll keep seeing it incorporated into your favorite gadgets. Call me old-fashioned, but I personally love my wireless earbuds with Hi-Fi sound, great ANC, and solid battery life, but maybe I’m out of touch. I guess you can just pat me on the shoulder when the AI ​​earbud revolution rolls around; I won’t be able to listen to your sentimental news with my old, non-AI-focused earbuds stuffed into my Luddite ears.





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