What Is Apple Adaptive Audio (And Why Your Ears Should Care)

It happens all the time, you've got your headphones in, blissfully unaware that someone starts talking to you or that there's suddenly something you need to hear. You then have to pause whatever you were listening to to figure out what you might have missed.

To combat any such potential annoyances (and to give your ears a break) yesterday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, the company announced that it will be updating its AirPods to include Adaptive Audio capabilities. AirPods already have active noise cancellation features, but Adaptive Audio takes that a bit further. It can automatically change the volume and noise cancellation of your AirPods to suit your environment.

This allows the AirPods to automatically block out distracting noises, while allowing the wearer hear anything important. Apple accomplishes this through the magic of machine learning. This update will go live for 2nd generation AirPods Pro during the fall of this year.

Apple is using that same machine learning for some additional upcoming features: personalized volume and conversation awareness. The personalized volume feature will allow your Airpods and devices to "learn" the volume level at which you typically listen to content and cater your listening experience accordingly. This allows not only allows you to find the sweet spot for volume, but also can help potentially stave off hearing damage in the long run. 

Conversation awareness keeps a digital ear out for speaking, and if it detects that you are talking or someone is talking to you, it lowers the volume of whatever you are listening to automatically, and will also reduce background noise. 

While all of the announced upcoming features seem like small quality of life improvements, they might be a gamechanger if you are someone who wears their AirPods a lot while working out, working, or while you're out and about.