Sennheiser joins ‘Works with Magic Leap’ certification program

Sennheiser just announced it’ll be working with Magic Leap to create spatial audio accessories for the latter’s augmented reality headset’s platform. The headphone and audio gear company will be joining the “Works with Magic Leap” certification program, which is basically a way to ensure the accessories developed for the Magic Leap One will interact with the headset the way it should. Sennheiser hints in the announcement that it might reveal more news at Magic Leap’s L.E.A.P. conference next month.

CES 2018: Qualcomm claims its newest SoC fixes issues plaguing wireless earbuds

Wireless earbuds makes things easier for users but it isn’t without fault. Qualcomm hopes to fix the issues plaguing these tiny wearables have. The new QCC5100 chipset claims to offer three times the battery life of previous devices and it comes with more wireless transmitting power, meaning it’ll most likely not cut out as much even when it encounters interference.

When compared to its predecessor, it’s said to have twice the processing power. This means, manufacturers can introduce better noise cancelling as well as integrate smart assistants and other smart features. The possibility of getting zero-delay fast translation like those in the Pixel Bud might head your way. We can’t say yet though when we might see manufacturers integrate this chip into their audio accessories.

Source: Engadget

Bose might have accidentally leaked upcoming/unreleased headphones via email newsletter

It looks like Bose’s team in charge of sending out its email newsletter might have let a secret slip. Some keen-eyed recipients of the company’s email newsletter noticed something odd about the featured image, which you can see above. It looks like the company’s noise-cancelling QC35 headphones but upon deeper inspection it features a button that isn’t there on said headset. Underneath the left earcup there is a pill-shaped button. The image’s filename is even more telling: email_QC35upgrade_img3.png. People are starting to speculate that this could be a new iteration of the QC35. It might be due an upgrade as the original one came out in June last year.

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Adobe makes it easier to edit speech with Project VoCo

Adobe’s new experimental project might change the way we look at, or rather listen to, speeches. Introduced at its annual MAX conference in San Diego, Project VoCo allows you to edit speech like you would a word document. And it isn’t just about editing existing recordings, you can even use the same voice model to create completely new recordings. Project VoCo just needs around 20 minutes of voice samples from a particular speaker. It’ll then analyze and break down this speech into phonemes, transcribe this, and create the voice model. According to TechCrunch, if you listen closely now, you’ll be able to hear when a word is changed but we won’t be surprised if there comes a time when you won’t be able to distinguish the actual recording from the edited/fake one.

Adobe didn’t use traditional speech synthesis technology with this but used what they call “voice conversion.” And it requires hardly any manual intervention. You can edit the auto-generated transcript but there is no need to set timestamps. The algorithms will figure this out themselves. While this could raise a lot of questions, especially since it’ll become harder to trust recordings now. It’s still a pretty cool technological advancement. Adobe won’t commit to shipping this technology but who knows if this’ll show up in any of their products? They’ve done a lot of that in the past.