These Wireless Earbuds Have a Screen, ChatGPT, and a Cute Robot Face—but They Sound Terrible

I like wireless earbuds because I love music. It’s very straightforward; music exists, and I want to listen to it, and wireless earbuds are the thing that gets me to the thing I love. Problem solved. You can’t see it, but I’m smugly dusting my hands right now like a mathematician at a chalkboard. There’s a symbiosis between the buds and me. A simplicity. A supply and demand so fundamental that in the gadget world, it feels like a law of nature.

But, as much as I love wireless audio, there are some reasons for loving buds that I have never thought of before. For instance, productivity. It has never once occurred to me that wireless earbuds can turn me into some kind of capitalist brain machine, as much as employers would love that. Or using them to “remember everything” and/or “know everything.” I personally like it when they make fun sounds, but I guess becoming some kind of omnipotent techno-deity would be sick, too. I have also never thought to use them as a tool to record every conversation I ever have without telling anyone, either—probably because I ain’t a NARC. But this is the age of AI, and maybe I’m just not thinking big enough; maybe I need to expand my mind; maybe it’s time to optimize my future, maaaan.

To help open me up to the possibilities of wireless earbuds in the era of AI, I shoved a pair from a brand called Oso in my ears. These $170 AI wireless earbuds were crowdfunded through Kickstarter and promise big things. Marketing highlights include “revolutionizing productivity, one conversation at a time,” and “remember everything, know everything.” And here I was just trying to have a news roundup podcast serenely explain to me how messed up the world is!

To pave the way toward a more productive self, Oso AI Earbuds have zeroed in on using ChatGPT via the cloud to power a few capabilities. Chief among them seems to be transcription. Indeed, with a companion app, you can use your Oso AI Earbuds to listen to your surroundings and then have that conversation, or presentation, or YouTube video transcribed by AI in the cloud. There’s nothing groundbreaking about AI transcription, but I guess putting it in wireless earbuds is a newish approach? I used Oso’s wireless earbuds to record some stuff while I was at a press briefing, and it worked fairly well, despite the fact that the presenters were not native English speakers and the volume of their mics wasn’t ideal. You can also use it to record virtual meetings and calls.

I took a call with the Oso AI Earbuds and used them to transcribe part of it, and while the transcription worked just fine, the experience for the person on the other end was not ideal. According to the person I called, these wireless earbuds pick up a lot of ambient noise—she was able to hear someone moving glasses in Gizmodo’s communal kitchen, an elevator beep, and someone having a phone call about 20 feet away from me. On one hand, it’s good that these wireless earbuds can pick up so much, since it means they won’t miss a word when you’re recording, but for the person on the other end, the experience can be ridiculously distracting. It’s especially strange considering the wireless earbuds are advertised as having “dual beamforming mics with ENC.” That’s not a typo for ANC; ENC stands for “environmental noise cancellation.” I’m not sure which environmental noise the Oso AI Earbuds are cancelling, but they certainly weren’t interested in tackling ambient noise in my office.

Another pillar of the Oso AI Earbuds is being able to use them as a voice assistant powered by ChatGPT. Again, this isn’t a novel idea; Nothing’s wireless earbuds were the first to advertise a ChatGPT integration last year. I tested that feature out, and while I could see its potential usefulness in theory, I wasn’t wholly impressed with actually using it for real-life stuff like figuring out where to eat or what the Knicks’ score is. I was looking forward to testing out if there was any difference between testing ChatGPT out last year and now, but unfortunately, Oso’s AI Earbuds had other plans.

Since iPhones don’t play nice with anything that doesn’t come freshly baked out of Foxconn with an Apple logo on it, Oso’s app offers a Siri shortcut that is supposed to act as a workaround for activating the buds’ voice assistant, which has (comically, I may add) been dubbed “Judy.” I added my Judy shortcut to Siri in iOS just like the app asked, but when I tried to activate it by uttering “Siri, Judy,” like the shortcut is designed to do, I was met with a notification that I have not paid for “Laxis Pro,” which is a premium version of the app that powers the AI wireless earbuds. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or not, but if it’s not, I suppose no one ever said reaching productivity god status came without a price—in this case, a literal one in USD.

There are a bunch of other weird things about these wireless earbuds that are both fun and totally useless, and they’re maybe my favorite part of Oso. For one, the case has a display on it, and that screen has a silly-looking robot face. It grabbed my attention and the wonder of other Gizmodo staff right away, because (duh) cute robot assistant. Unfortunately, I’m still unsure what the purpose of that face is outside of just looking cute. There are also some other features on the screen that let you control aspects of the buds or audio playback, like skipping tracks, play-pause, and preset EQ adjustments for “rock,” or “pop” etc… There’s also a timer, a volume slider, and a screen that shows the date and time. All of those can be swiped through Tinder-style. Nothing about this experience is necessary or really that useful, but I love it anyway. These are the types of strange form factors you can only get in a crowdfunded device, and even if they’re impractical, it breaks the monotony of AirPods dupes.

As long as we’re talking about hardware, it’s worth touching on some stuff I definitely don’t like. One of those things is the wireless earbuds themselves, which don’t have ear tips, but just a bud that is meant to nest in your outer ear (think AirPods 4). That design is intentional since it allows you to hear your surroundings with the wireless earbuds in and makes them more comfortable during longer periods of use, but it also just kind of sucks. I never feel like the Oso AI Earbuds are fully secure in my ears, and I know I’m not alone in feeling that way with earbuds sans tips. That design also has a ripple effect on the worst part of these buds: the sound.

These are not wireless earbuds you should listen to music on. The sound is flat and not super loud, which is a problem given the ambient noise bleed I described above. No amount of preset EQ can fix that, either. Music playback, while built into the experience via the case with touch controls and preset EQ is clearly an afterthought here, and if you’re looking to get a pair of wireless earbuds that can work for AI transcription and double as your daily driver for music, you will be very disappointed. That’s a bummer on any pair of wireless earbuds, but especially so when you consider the $170 price tag.

Oh, and battery life is middling. Oso rates the wireless earbuds for 6 hours of playback, which would be fine until you realize that most earbuds at this price have 6 hours of battery with ANC. These wireless earbuds, as a matter of record, do not have ANC. If you can stand listening to Oso AI Earbuds for extended periods, the case holds 21 hours of battery.

Maybe I’m expecting too much from a pair of crowdfunded wireless earbuds, but I was promised (at the very least) a useful tool for productivity. And maybe recording everything all the time, pissing people off that I’m calling off with ambient noise bleed, dealing with unexpected paywalls, praying that my wireless earbuds don’t fall out of my ears on the subway platform, trying to figure out whether the face on my earbuds case is mad at me, and failing to use a voice assistant named Judy are getting me closer to the ultimate cog in the productivity machine, and I just can’t see it yet. Or maybe the simplest explanation is best. Maybe wireless earbuds don’t have to help me transcend—maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe it’s okay that they just do what they’ve always done: connect to my phone and play some really good fucking music.