These wireless headphones have a screen, a chatppt and a pretty robot face – but they seem terrible

To help open up to the possibilities of wireless headphones in the AI ​​era, I pushed a pair of a brand called OSO in my ears. These wireless headphones of $ 170 were financed by crowdfunding by Kickstarter and promise great things. The protruding facts of marketing include “revolutionized productivity, a conversation at the same time” and “remember everything, know everything”. And here, I was just trying to have a Roundup News podcast explaining serenely how spoiled the world is!

To open the way to a more productive self, OSO AI headphones are zero on the use of chatgpt via the cloud to supply some capacities. The chief among them seems to be the transcription. Indeed, with a companion application, you can use your OSO AI headphones to listen to your environment, then have this conversation, or presentation, or YouTube video transcribed by AI in the cloud. There is nothing revolutionary on the transcription of AI, but I suppose that putting it in wireless headphones is a new approach? I used OSO wireless headphones to record certain things while I was in a press briefing, and it worked fairly well, despite the fact that the presenters were not native English speakers and the volume of their microphones was not ideal. You can also use it to record virtual meetings and calls.

I made a call with the OSO AI headphones and used them to transcribe a game, and although the transcription works very well, the experience for the person at the other end was not ideal. According to the person I have called, these wireless headphones collect a lot of ambient noise – she could hear someone moving glasses in the common kitchen of Gizmodo, an elevator beep and someone who has a telephone call about 20 feet from me. On the one hand, it is good that these wireless headphones can pick up as much, because it means that they do not miss a word when you save, but for the person on the other side, the experience can be ridiculously distracing. This is particularly strange since wireless headphones are announced as having “double bundle training microphones with inc”. It is not a typing fault for the ANC; Inc means “cancellation of environmental noise”. I do not know what environmental noise that the OSO AI headphones cancel, but they were certainly not interested in fighting the ambient noise in my office.

Another pillar of the OSO AI headphones is to be able to use them as a vocal assistant powered by Chatgpt. Again, this is not a new idea; Wireless headphones were the first to announce a chatgpt integration last year. I tested this feature, and even if I could see its potential usefulness in theory, I was not totally impressed by using it really for real things like determining where to eat or what is the Knicks score. I was looking forward to testing if there was a difference between testing Chatgpt last year and now, but unfortunately, the headphones of OSO AI had other plans.

Since iPhones do not play well with anything that does not come out freshly cooked in Foxconn with an Apple logo on it, the OSO application offers a Siri shortcut which is supposed to act as a bypass to activate the vocal assistant of buds, which has (comically, I can add) nicknamed “Judy”. I added my shortcut Judy to Siri in iOS as the application asked, but when I tried to activate it by pronouncing “Siri, Judy”, as the shortcut is designed to do so, I was greeted by the notification that I did not pay for “Laxis Pro”, which is a premium version of the application that feeds wireless headers. I do not know if it is a bug or not, but if it is not the case, I suppose that no one has ever said that the status of God of productivity came without price – in this case, literal in USD.

There are a lot of other strange things about these wireless headphones that are both fun and completely useless, and they may be my favorite part of OSO. On the one hand, the housing has a display on it, and this screen has an silly robot face. He attracted my attention and the wonder of other Gizmodo staff members, because (Duh) Cute robot assistant. Unfortunately, I still don’t know what is the goal of this face outside the cute air. There are also other features on the screen that allow you to control the aspects of buds or audio reading, such as leaping tracks, playing and preset adjustments for “rock” or “pop” etc … There is also a timer, a volume cursor and a screen that shows the date and time. All these elements can be slipped through the Tinder style. Nothing in this experience is necessary or really useful, but I still love it. These are the types of factors of strange shape that you can only get in a device funded by the crowdfund, and even if they are not practical, it breaks the monotony of the AirPods dupes.

As long as we talk about equipment, it is worth approaching certain things that I certainly don’t like. One of these things is the wireless headphones themselves, which have no ear tips, but just a bud which is supposed to nest in your outer ear (think of AirPods 4). This design is intentional because it allows you to hear your environment with wireless headphones and makes them more comfortable for longer periods of use, but it is also somewhat. I never have the impression that the OSO AI headphones are completely sure in my ears, and I know that I am not alone in feeling this way with headphones without tips. This design also has a training effect on the worst part of these buds: sound.

They are not wireless headphones on which you should listen to music. The sound is flat and not super strong, which is a problem given the bleeding of the ambient noise that I described above. No quantity of preset preset can also solve this problem. Reading music, although integrated into the experience via the case with tactile orders and a predefined EQ is clearly a reflection afterwards here, and if you are looking to obtain a pair of wireless headphones that can work for the transcription of AI And Double as a daily pilot for music, you will be very disappointed. It is a disappointment on any pair of wireless headphones, but especially when you consider the price of $ 170.

Oh, and the battery life is intermediate. OSO assesses wireless headphones for 6 hours of reading, which would be good until you realize that most headphones at this price have 6 hours of battery with the anc. These wireless headphones, in the event of a file, have not ancient. If you can listen to the OSO AI headphones for long periods, the case contains 21 hours of battery.

Perhaps I expect too much from a pair of wireless egish financed by the financing of the crowd, but I was promised (at the very least) a useful tool for productivity. And perhaps the recording of all the time, pissing off the people I call with an ambient noise bleeding, dealing with unexpected payment walls, praying that my wireless headphones do not fall from my ears on the metro platform, trying to determine if the face on my headphones is crazy about me, and failing to use a vocal assistant named Judy Productivity, and I cannot get closer to the ultimate cogion in the productivity machine, and I cannot get closer to the ultimate cogion in the productivity machine, and I cannot get closer to the Ultimate Coue in the productivity machine, and I cannot get closer to the Ultimate Coue in the productivity machine, and me. Or maybe the simplest explanation is the best. Maybe wireless headphones don’t have to help me transcend-maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe it’s normal that they just do what they have always done: connect to my phone and play a very good fucking music.