Apple is preparing to launch a new upgrade for the AirPods headphones. A new report revealed that the company has reached advanced stages of developing headphones that include cameras capable of providing the personal assistant “Siri” with visual data.
According to what Bloomberg reported in a recent report, the headphones have entered the “design verification testing” phase, which is one of the final stages before the start of large-scale production tests.
However, it seems that the launch date is still linked to the delay in development of the new version of Siri. The report indicated that Apple was planning to unveil the headphones during the first half of this year, but postponing the Siri update prompted the company to postpone the project. Information indicates that the advanced version of the voice assistant may arrive next September, after improving its basic models based on Google’s Gemini models.
The cameras built into the headphones are not intended to take pictures or record video, but rather will be used to provide Siri with visual data that will help it understand what the user is looking at, and answer questions related to the surrounding scene.
This could enable new practical uses for visual AI, such as recognizing food ingredients and suggesting suitable recipes, or providing walking directions based on surrounding landmarks, in addition to creating reminders linked to the objects detected by the headphones.
However, privacy is one of the biggest challenges facing the project. The report stated that Apple added a small LED light to the headphones to alert users when visual data is sent to Apple’s servers for cloud processing, in a move aimed at enhancing transparency and increasing confidence in the mechanism of using cameras.
The issue of battery life is still unclear yet; It is expected that adding cameras will increase power consumption.
It is worth noting that the AirPods Pro 3 headphones currently provide up to 8 hours of listening with the noise cancellation feature activated, and the battery life in total reaches 24 hours using the charging case, which means that Apple may have to balance the new artificial intelligence capabilities, and maintaining acceptable battery life. (aitnews)
