When Apple presents its latest fancy video presentation at WWDC 2024 next week, we'll get our first look at what iOS 18 will offer, and that could include some useful improvements to AirPods, too.
Apple's apparent new focus on all things AI-enhanced has the potential to deliver some useful improvements to AirPods, especially the more powerful AirPods Pro 2, but even without AI, there are plenty of ways the iOS 18 update could improve our experience with AirPods Max. or AirPods 3 even better.
Here are 10 AirPods updates we'd love to see Apple announce next week.
1. Smarter conversations
As we reported last week, researchers at the University of Washington have developed an AI-powered feature that goes beyond what Apple's Conversation Awareness can do. Apple's feature helps you hear someone speak by turning off noise cancellation and increasing the volume of their voice when it detects someone speaking, but the researchers' experimental feature goes further: it uses AI to isolate the person's speech and keep canceling everything else. It's a long way from production, but AI could definitely improve noise cancellation. For example…
2. Customizable cancellation
AI could improve noise cancellation in some interesting ways, and once again, the University of Washington is figuring out what those ways are. Its “semantic hearing” system offers nuanced noise cancellation, so you can choose to let certain sounds through, whether it's a baby crying, birds chirping, emergency vehicle sirens, or speech.
3. Environmental awareness
The active noise cancellation on the AirPods Pro 2 is really good. But AI could make it smarter. AirPods 2's adaptive audio automatically adjusts the volume of your media and combines ANC and Transparency modes when it detects you move from noisy to quiet environments. Combine that with location awareness and customizable cancellation and your AirPods could offer a much tighter ANC experience depending on whether you're at home, in the office or on the train between them – rivals like the Sony WF-1000XM5 and the Sennheiser . Momentum 4 Wireless already offers this.
4. Excellent equalizer
The lack of a custom equalizer in Apple's mobile music offerings is a constant irritation that dates back to the iPod era: while the Music app offers an adjustable equalizer, you're left with a handful of equalizer presets on your iPhone if you are using AirPods. Instead of headphones or earphones from other companies, these usually have companion apps that allow you to reshape the sound. We're not optimistic, but it's an improvement we'd love to see and hear in iOS 18.
AI could play a role here too. Something we're starting to see in music creation software is the use of AI to shape sounds, and Apple is one of the companies offering this technology in its latest version of Logic Pro. The most spectacular examples of this are Stem Splitter, which uses AI to separate tracks into drums, bass, vocals, and other instruments that you can then adjust, and ChromaGlow, which adds warmth, presence, and punch to tracks.
And that raises the tantalizing prospect of shaping the sound in the Music app to offer smart EQ and boost, so instead of just telling it you want more bass or treble, you can tell it to boost vocals or drums, or that you want a warmer sound. .
5. Live translation
Of all the potential AI AirPods features, this is one of the most interesting: it would turn your AirPods into the Babel fish of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a real-time translator for the world's many languages. Google has already tried this with its Pixel Buds, so we're not talking science fiction, but real-time translation is quite demanding, so like Google, we think Apple would use its iPhone to do the heavy lifting .
6. (Almost) Lossless Audio
AirPods don't offer higher-resolution wireless audio, but newer models support a version of Bluetooth that has enough bandwidth to play more lossless tracks on Apple Music (or Tidal, etc.). It won't be the kind of full, lossless high-resolution audio you get from wired listening, but an Apple equivalent of aptX or Sony's LDAC technology is entirely possible, as our own Matt Bolton describes in detail here.
7. Super powerful Shazaming
The Shazam song recognition built into iOS is clever, but Google goes further: its YouTube Music app lets you hum or sing a song and have Google tell you what you want and offer to play it. These are the kinds of things that AI can really excel at: the hardest part is getting the human version close enough to the original so that the app can find the right match in its database; We'd love to have that feature, with support on AirPods as well.
8. AI Audio Generation
AI could take the iPhone's background sounds, which can create white noise and ambient noise to help you study, relax or sleep, and boost them. Generative AI could further improve this feature by allowing you to customize the type of noise you want: instead of just “Ocean” or “Rain,” you can ask Siri to generate something much more specific, or even a combination of “Rain with ambient synthesizers”. “maybe. Again, it would be great to be able to order them right above your AirPods.
9. Hearing aid mode
This is the subject of repeated rumors that say it will be unveiled at WWDC 2024 and will be the most significant update to the AirPods in 2024. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, it's the start of Apple's push into the newly deregulated headphone sector . . The US FDA now allows hearing aids to be sold over the counter, and that's a huge potential market for Apple. AirPods already include several accessibility tools designed to help the hearing-impaired, so we're sure to get more of that. And we hope it includes support for Bluetooth Auracast, which is shaping up to be a big deal in hearing health technology, as well as the best headphones.
10. Universal Audio Settings
One of my pet peeves is getting audio that's too loud when I switch from music or podcast apps to others, like social media or games. It would be helpful to have a Settings screen where you could set levels independently for different things, like music and podcasts, in-app events, notifications, etc., or even for different apps.
What's up with the new AirPods hardware?
While we expect to see new AirPods models this year, we don't think we'll see them at WWDC.
Reports indicate that the AirPods 3 will have not one but two successors. The AirPods 4 are expected to come in two versions with two prices: a regular set and a simpler, more affordable model. The latter could be some kind of AirPods Lite, with a rumored price of $99. They are expected to be released in September or October, at the same time as the final version of iOS 18 is released.
We also expect to see the AirPods Max 2 later in 2024, although that doesn't seem certain: they may not appear until 2025 either, although they're relatively old now and lack the mandatory USB-C. We don't expect to see AirPods Pro 3 this year; Experts say a 2025 launch is more likely.
