A growing collection of pocket-sized gadgets lets you record your meetings and extract value from them. Whether sitting in class, a meeting, or an interview, I've never been fond of taking notes, and I'm far from alone. Not only does the process of scribbling something down cause me to miss what was said immediately after, but I also suffer from awful handwriting, meaning that I can rarely read the notes anyway. Recording interviews has long been a solution, but transcribing interviews is another step (with extra cost) that can leave you with thousands of words of material to sift through, much of it irrelevant. AI notetakers--massively popular at CES 2026 --have emerged to offer a new way of making IRL notetaking easier and faster, putting the power of AI into (or at least adjacent to) a portable device that evokes the microcassette recorder of yesteryear.

From jogging and cycling to multi-tasking or puttering around the house, open earbuds are an excellent way to jam out in the real world. If you've done any wireless earbuds shopping lately, you've likely noticed a new design category cropping up everywhere. They're called open earbuds (or open-ear buds, depending on the brand), and just about every audio brand has a pair (or three). They come in a slew of styles, but most either loop around your ears like older Beats buds, or clip on like funky-futuristic earrings. Whatever the style, they're designed to deliver satisfying sound while keeping your ear canals open to the sounds of the world around you.

Apple could unveil Gemini-powered Siri in Feb. These open-fit earbuds actually make a difference with background noise. Rarely does a set of open-fit earbuds actually impress me. I tend to find them underwhelming because overall sound quality is subpar compared to the more "traditional" in-ear models. The first time I used the Shokz OpenFit Pro ($249.95)

We're in Las Vegas with two ears and a heart, on the search for the best in immersive open earbuds, portable Bluetooth speakers, powered stereo setups, and more. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. When it comes to audio systems at CES, held January 6-9 in Las Vegas, we always hope to find new ways companies have found to make music feel bigger without making your life harder. Sometimes that means earbuds you pull out of your pocket to pull previously unheard details out of tracks. Sometimes that means a wireless headset that considers limited bandwidth a personal insult.

Failing to be aware of speeding vehicles approaching from behind poses a huge threat to the road safety of pedestrians and cyclists. In this paper, we propose BlinkBud, which utilizes a single earbud and a paired phone to online detect hazardous objects approaching from behind of a user. The core idea is to accurately track visually identified objects utilizing a small number of sampled camera images taken from the earbud. To minimize the power consumption of the earbud and the phone while guaranteeing the best tracking accuracy, a novel 3D object tracking algorithm is devised, integrating both a Kalman filter based trajectory estimation scheme and an optimal image sampling strategy based on reinforcement learning. Moreover, the impact of constant user head movements on the tracking accuracy is significantly eliminated by leveraging the estimated pitch and yaw angles to correct the object depth estimation and align the camera coordinate system to the user's body coordinate system, respectively. We implement a prototype BlinkBud system and conduct extensive real-world experiments. Results show that BlinkBud is lightweight with ultra-low mean power consumptions of 29.8 mW and 702.6 mW on the earbud and smartphone, respectively, and can accurately detect hazards with a low average false positive ratio (FPR) and false negative ratio (FNR) of 4.90% and 1.47%, respectively.

Amazon's Cyber Monday sale drops prices on tons of its most popular and best-reviewed products. Get all your holiday shopping done now. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. The Sunday scaries don't exist on the day before Cyber Monday . In fact, the only fear you should have right now is that you'll miss out on the best deals on the biggest online shopping day of the year.

While the Switch 2 itself isn't on sale, you can still find good prices on bundles and accessories. The second generation of Nintendo's beloved hybrid console arrived earlier this year . The Switch 2 has incredible screen quality, backwards compatibility with older Switch games and peripherals, and refined Joy-Con 2 grips (the real necessity of an updated Switch). It's sure to be on many people's Christmas lists, including my own. Sadly the device itself isn't on sale, but there are some bundles and accessories you can shop instead.

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Bose ANC headphones and earbuds are one of the things I never travel without because they bring the kind of quiet that turns an airplane cabin into a reflection room or an office into an iso booth. Whether you're on a red-eye or running a remote-work coffee-shop marathon, Bose QuietComfort offers just that: mute-the-world magic in an all-day-wear build. And right now, you can take 45 percent off the Bose QuietComfort Headphones for Black Friday. With Quiet and Aware modes plus customizable listening profiles, you can go from "cone of silence" to "hear the boarding call" with a tap.

Gear Audio These are the 67 best audio deals we've found for Black Friday, with editor-approved picks for every budget (updated) Hear me now: I review audio products all year and these are what I'd buy during Amazon's Black Friday sale, with dozens of headphones, earbuds, speakers, and more at their lowest prices of the year. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. If you've been thinking about upgrading your audio setup--whether that's for New Release Fridays, movie night, outdoor runs, late-night gaming, or dialing in studio-grade sound--this batch of deals covers just about every scenario. From pocketable gaming buds to open-ear runners and serious audiophile cans, we've collected the standout picks on sale now. There have already been some great deals on JBL, Sony, Bose, and Beats products, among others, in Amazon's lead-up to Black Friday.

Widely available earbuds equipped with sensors (also known as earables) can be combined with a sleep event detection algorithm to offer a convenient alternative to laborious clinical tests for individuals suffering from sleep disorders. Although various solutions utilizing such devices have been proposed to detect sleep events, they ignore the fact that individuals often share sleeping spaces with roommates or couples. To address this issue, we introduce DreamCatcher, the first publicly available dataset for wearer-aware sleep event algorithm development on earables.