In the age of agentic AI, headphones are no longer the straightforward audio devices they once were.
You’ve likely noticed AI has increasingly been sneaking into more of your new devices over the past few years, whether you asked for it or not. The next frontier? It’s time to ready yourself for an influx of AI-powered headphones.
On Wednesday at its Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 chip, which will bring new features to audio wearables, or “hearables,” as they’re sometimes referred to in the tech industry. These might look and feel like the audio products you’ve been strapping to your head for many years, but they’ll have a whole different set of features and capabilities.
Some might use AI to provide you with a better sound experience, improving music quality and making your headphones able to more intelligently adapt to your world – identifying an approaching siren and lowering the volume of your music so you know not to step onto the road, for example. Others might use AI to enable real-time translation as a conduit for interacting with agents or for note-taking, like the recently revealed Plaud One. Hidden use case C could enable so-called multimodal interactions – for example, combining audio with vision and AI in audio-forward glasses or headphones with cameras.
Qualcomm envisages the Sound Elite Gen 2 chip being used in a range of different audio devices. These include the usual suspects – earbuds , headphones, open-ear and hybrid audio devices.
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