I recently got gifted the latest Zolo Liberty+ and I gifted them onto someone else. Why? Because I knew they didn’t match my use case needs and I didn’t want the Anker generosity to be wasted on a shelf so I passed them to someone who jogs, a pasttime which probably benefits from fully wireless.
That got me thinking, of what would it take for a totally wireless bud to meet my use case? I doubt Anker under the Zolo brand can do this quickly but here’s my wishlist:
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a totally hidden device which you have to look closely to spot. Such devices exist now and they’re called hearing aids. People with impaired hearing use these all day.
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all-day battery life so a minimum 16 hours active use, ideally 24h, such as we get now with the Soundbuds Life. Given I want them to be very small (above) and 8x current Liberty+ battery life, that will take many technology advances. However I think this is viable in the not too distant future given hearing aids are for hearing impaired and they produce louder noise to compensate so someone without hearing impairment can be presented with less loud noise so the battery life should improve relative to a hearing impaired hearing aid.
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augmented reality. You’d use these not just to hear music, but because they are in all the time you’d use them to hear better, similar to hearing aid, but where you can pick a mode (configured via mobile app or voice recognition) where it modifies the real ambient noise and removes or enhances natural sound for a particular purpose.
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example: in a harsh noisy environment they remove unwanted noise. This is today’s noise isolation but selective, e.g. remove all noises which are not in the range of normal human speech so you can hear people better in a noisy environment
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boost important quiet sounds - this is what a hearing aid does but you could make it pick up a distant quieter voice and make those louder, so in effect making every voice the same volume regardless of how much effort they put in or distance.
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directional filtering. Given the buds are in both ears they know left/right and so via removing unwanted noises in all but one direction. So you could filter out everything but one person speaking
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intelligent audio playing - we have this to a degree now you’re listening to music and someone phones you, it cuts over to answering the call then resumes the music. But I’m thinking we could make this a safety feature where you’re listening to music but a certain sound is fast moving and coming at you, the buds should stop playing the music, present the external threat to you but augmented, making it obvious - the equivalent of a siren warning. Possibly combined with intelligent motion sensing clothing / technology it turns a silent threat behind you into an audible threat. For example a silent electrical vehicle coming at you becomes a noise like a car coming at you.
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babel fish mode - it translates the language it hears into your preferred language. These are emerging now, technology needs to improve.
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in addition to the safety aspects, they help attenuate reality to use your hearing for detecting threats, they also will act to protect hearing because loud noises which damage hearing are removed via the noise cancellation and noise isolation, so we’d expect after this device was invented and became popular, hearing loss in the population would progressively reduce.
The app on your phone picks the modes. Given these buds have microphones and understand what is a voice, it can follow your instructions. You could also imagine tapping on the bone behind the ear for special commands.
I also speculate as to energy sources, well given these absorb sound and filter, they are presenting internally less sound energy than presented to it externally, so theoretically it take that difference and make it a power source? Not much power admittedly but then it doesn’t need to produce much power output itself given its right in the ear so relatively speaking it could be a useful battery life extender to use absorbed sound energy.
What do you think? Any other wishlists?
Would you buy one if they ever existed?
Would they be legal?