From Audio Glasses to Earbuds With Cameras, Headphones Are Getting a Major AI Rebrand

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. But it also says they can be used in audio glasses and “future multimodal wearables” – a vague term that can be broadly interpreted as new types of product that haven’t been invented yet.

Qualcomm’s chips are designed both with specific devices in mind and for companies to run with and build something new. Just take last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5: It was designed for top Android phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S26 series, but it was also used by Honor to build its Robot Phone – a novel handset with a built-in robotic gimbal.

While there’s some level of predictability to the types of devices the Sound Elite Gen 2 will feature in, the platform is also open-ended enough for companies to use it in ways even Qualcomm hasn’t foreseen. Ziad Asghar, a senior vice president at the company, said that he’s surprised “all the time” at what the chipmaker’s partners dream up.

“The innovation [in] form factor right now is still morphing, it’s still changing,” he said. “We don’t know what end product [the chip] might even go into.”

What’s new in the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 Chip?

The footprint of this latest Sound Elite chip is 30% smaller than that of its predecessor, as well as having double the AI capability and offering up to 40% lower power consumption. This combination of being smaller, more powerful and more power efficient is the chip upgrade trifecta, but what difference will that actually make?

Qualcomm thinks it will move you closer to your personal AI future. This is the idea that thanks to your always-sensing, always-on galaxy of devices – which could include your watch, phone, glasses, earbuds, car and home tech – the combination of constant context capture and AI agents will enable better understanding of your wants and needs.

Hearables play an important role in bringing the vision for personal AI to life because they sit close to your ears and mouth, allowing for both input and output of audio.

“As AI becomes a core capability, users will increasingly expect more natural ways to interact with it,” said Asghar, speaking at the Snapdragon Summit. “Those interactions won’t always happen through a screen. They will happen through natural conversations, where users can simply speak to an AI assistant and receive help in real time.”

Another technical aspect of making this happen is the Sound Elite Gen 2 chip’s direct-to-cloud connectivity, enabled by micro-power Wi-Fi 6E. This technology was designed to give Wi-Fi connectivity with the power of Bluetooth inside tiny products. For the generation included in this chip, Qualcomm has reduced the power requirements even further and increased the speed to provide always-on availability.

Additionally, the chip will include Qualcomm aptX Lossless – an audio quality boost to appease the audiophiles among us – and Qualcomm XPAN, which extends connectivity beyond the range you’d typically expect from Bluetooth. Qualcomm is also deploying AI to improve active noise cancellation, speech capture and voice clarity by providing more advanced support for multiple mics.

Keep your ear to the ground for devices making use of this chip for more personalized and intelligent audio experiences – and remember, they might not look exactly how you expect them to.

Editors’ note: Katie Collins’ travel costs were covered by Qualcomm. The judgments and opinions of CNET are our own.