The age of the generative AI gadget has been disappointing at best. Devices like Humane’s AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 were disappointments at launch, falling victim to their own respective hype cycles. Generative AI has a future on consumer hardware, but you’d be forgiven for believing otherwise. The technology is having its moment on handsets, and headphones are a good natural extension of that push. Announced at Tuesday’s Made By Google Event, the Pixel Buds Pro 2 are an attempt to take that next step.
The earbuds arrive a little over two years after the company released the first-generation product. As with all of the hardware unveiled at Tuesday’s event, Google is placing its generative AI experience — specifically Gemini Live’s conversational capabilities — front and center.
“With the new Gemini Live in your earbuds, you can have a real back-and-forth conversation with an AI assistant,” the company told TechCrunch. “It feels like you’re talking to a close confidante, and it even works when your phone is in your pocket. You can ask different types of questions, with more open-ended queries, more walk-and-talks and longer sessions that are more contemplative. It’s like having a co-worker that’s always available to brainstorm or talk through an idea together.”
The uneasiness of the “close confidante” bit aside, the new Pixel Buds may be the realization of something Google and various other companies have been working toward for years. A lack of natural language conversational capacity has been a roadblock to wider smart assistant adoption. Companies have been overpromising and underdelivering on that front for a decade now.
One thing LLM-based neural networks do extraordinarily well is simulate conversation, so Gemini Live is a logical next step here. Whether most users will be comfortable with “walk-and-talks and longer sessions that are more contemplative,” however, is probably a question for a sociologist.
The arrival of Gemini Live on the Buds coincides with Google making Gemini the default assistant on the new Pixel 9 line. It’s powered in part by the earbuds’ Tensor A1 chip, which finds Google applying its mobile-chip-making know-how to the Pixel Buds line for the first time.
Google says the new chip also made it possible to reduce the Buds’ size by 27%, with faster processing speeds and battery life bumped up to a stated 12 hours on the Buds and 48 hours combined with the charging case. The Buds Pro 2 also support Google’s Find My Device, so you can locate lost ones on a map or have them and the charging case ring out if they’re buried under a pile of clothes in your apartment.
The new Silent Seal passive noise canceling, coupled with improvements to the active noise-canceling capabilities “cancel up to twice as much noise as before,” per Google. The $229 Buds start shipping September 26.