My first “smart” earbuds came out in 2019. By smart I mean control using touch and an app that lets you customize the equalizer settings. That’s all it was. Connect, listen, charge and repeat. Easy. You would choose earbuds based on how they sound, battery life and how secure they were while running. No one cared about which cloud service your earbuds were talking to or whether or not they used their AI models as there was no such question back then. Buying headphones is one of the few technology purchases you can still make by instinct rather than having specs opened in a new tab somewhere else. Not anymore.
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The spec sheet mentions enhanced ANC and lossless audio, and yes, both of those are there. However, there is much more going on, as this time around Qualcomm does not treat its audio wearable technology as an accessory to your phone, but as a computer on its own. This computer features a built-in Wi-Fi 6E radio, allowing a pair of earbuds or a set of smart glasses to communicate directly with the cloud, bypassing any other device on the way. A dedicated AI accelerator, processing at 128 GOPS and doubling the capacity of the previous generation, is included. Moreover, there is even a whole “Apps & Agents” platform that Qualcomm encourages OEMs to develop upon this platform. Radio, AI chip, and apps – all integrated into a single chipset previously used only for transferring audio signals to your headphones. This is not an audio platform anymore. This is an operating system.
Every class of wearable eventually becomes its own platform, rather than a simple accessory. It happened with watches, with the emergence of Wear OS and watchOS. Now it’s happening with audio wearables, and the impetus is the same one fueling everything else in tech at the moment – AI agents need a home beyond the smartphone screen.
Let’s examine what Qualcomm really is envisioning with those categories. Earbuds with cameras. Audio glasses that can serve as your Gemini interface. Hearing wellness wearables that quietly adapt to the ambient environment around you all day long. These aren’t AirPod-like earbuds. They’re standalone computing devices that happen to be situated by your ears, with their own AI, cloud connectivity and even real-time translation capability. It’s not quite the same buying decision that consumers made five years ago.
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The decision about what audio equipment to purchase used to boil down to three criteria – how good the ANC is, how much battery it has, and how well it fits. Well, here are several others to consider now. Who is the AI assistant running. Is there any need for its own internet connection. Can the smart functions operate without the phone at all. Are you tied to the closed ecosystem of the manufacturer?
That’s not a criticism of Qualcomm. It bets on the idea that people would use audio rather than visual means of communication with AI throughout their day. That is definitely a sound assumption. But each layer of AI intelligence added to the chip means additional specifications to figure out before the purchase.
In India in particular, it hits at a funny time. The market is barely getting used to the idea of buying “decent ANC TWS under three thousand rupees.” Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 throws everything back up for grabs, with camera headphones and AI glasses adjacent hardware in the mix before many consumers ever tried a translator headset. Cleer already unveiled a reference product based on this technology at Summit. This isn’t Powerpoint vaporware. Devices are coming.
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