When Apple unveils its latest fancy video presentation next week at WWDC 2024, we’ll get our first good look at what iOS 18 has to offer – and it could include some useful AirPods improvements.
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 make AirPods 3 even better.
Here are 10 AirPods upgrades that Apple would like to see announced 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 talking by turning off noise cancellation and increasing the volume of their voice when it detects someone talking, but the researchers’ experimental feature goes further: It uses AI to hear the person’s speech. isolate and continue to cancel everything else. It’s still a long way from production, but AI could certainly 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 discovering what those ways are. The “semantic hearing” system provides nuanced noise cancellation, so you can choose to let certain sounds through, whether that’s the sound of a baby crying, birdsong, emergency vehicle sirens or speech.
3. Environmental awareness
The active noise cancellation of the AirPods Pro 2 is really good. But AI could make it smarter. The Adaptive Audio in AirPods 2 automatically adjusts the volume of your media and combines ANC and Transparency modes when it detects that you go from a noisy to a quiet environment. Combine that with location awareness and customizable cancellation and your AirPods can provide a much more finely tuned ANC experience depending on whether you’re at home, in the office, or on the train in between – rivals like the Sony WF-1000XM5 and the Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless offer this already on.
4. Excellent EQ
The lack of custom EQ in Apple’s mobile music offerings is an ongoing irritation that dates back to the iPod era: while the Music app offers adjustable EQ, you’re stuck with a handful of EQ presets on your iPhone if you use AirPods in instead of other companies’ earbuds or headphones – these usually have companion apps that let you reshape the sound. We’re not optimistic, but it’s an improvement we’d like to see and hear in iOS 18.
AI could also play a role here. Something we’re starting to see in music making software is the use of AI to shape sounds – and Apple is one of the companies offering this technology in the latest version of Logic Pro. The most dramatic examples of this are Voice Splitter, which uses AI to separate the songs into drums, bass, vocals and other instruments that you can then adjust, and ChromaGlow, which adds warmth, presence and punch to songs.
And that raises the tantalizing prospect of sonic shaping in the Music app to deliver intelligent equalization and enhancement, so instead of just telling it you want more bass or treble, you can tell it to add vocals or drums. improve, or whether you want a warmer sound. .
5. Live translation
Of all the potential AI AirPods features, this is one of the most exciting: it would turn your AirPods into the Babel Fish of The hitchhiker’s guide to the Milky Way, 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 here – but real-time translation is quite demanding, so like Google, we think Apple would use your 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 create more lossless songs on Apple Music (or Tidal, etc.). It won’t be the kind of full, lossless hi-res 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 details here.
7. Super Powerful Shazaming
Shazam’s built-in song recognition in iOS is smart, but Google goes further: With the YouTube Music app, you can hum or sing a song and have Google tell you you want it and offer to play it. This is the kind of thing AI can really excel at: the hard part is getting the human version close enough to the original that the app can find the right match in its database – we’d love to have that feature, with support on AirPods also.
8. AI audio generation
AI could take the iPhone’s background noise – which can create white noise and ambient noise to help you study, relax or sleep – and give it a boost. Generative AI could improve this feature further by allowing you to customize the type of sound you want: instead of just ‘Ocean’ or ‘Rain’ you can ask Siri to generate something much more specific, or even a combination from ‘Rain’ with ambient synths. ” maybe. Again, it would be great to be able to ask these through your AirPods.
9. Hearing aid mode
This is the subject of repeated rumors that say it will be unveiled at WWDC 2024, and that it will be the major AirPods upgrade in 2024. According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, this is the start of Apple’s attempt to enter the recently deregulated hearing aid sector. . The US FDA now allows the sale of hearing aids without a prescription, 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 only get more of those. And we hope this will also include Bluetooth Auracast support, which is becoming a big thing in hearing health tech, as well as the best headphones.
10. Universal audio settings
One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing too loud sound when I switch from music or podcast apps to others, like social media or games. It would be useful to have a settings screen where you can independently set levels for different things – like music and podcasts, in-app events, notifications and so on – or even for different apps.
What about new AirPods hardware?
While we’re expecting new AirPods models this year, we don’t think we’ll see them at WWDC.
Reports indicate that the AirPods 3 will get not one but two successors. The AirPods 4 are expected to come in two versions with two price tags: a regular set and a simpler, more affordable model. The latter could be a kind of AirPods Lite, with a rumored price tag of $99. They are expected to arrive in September or October, at the same time as the release of the final version of iOS 18.
We’re hoping to see AirPods Max 2 later in 2024 too, although that doesn’t look certain – they might not arrive until 2025, even though they’re relatively old now and lack the obligatory USB-C. We don’t expect to see AirPods Pro 3 this year; Insiders say a 2025 launch is more likely.