{"id":350277,"date":"2025-12-17T03:42:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T03:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/350277\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T03:42:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T03:42:16","slug":"airpods-might-get-a-big-dose-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/350277\/","title":{"rendered":"AirPods Might Get a Big Dose of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I\u2019ve established previously, AI is coming for your wireless earbuds<\/a>, whether you like it or not, and that trend may extend to AirPods. According to leaked code<\/a> from an iPhone prototype running an early build of iOS 26<\/a>, AirPods might get a hefty dose of Apple Intelligence as soon as spring 2026.<\/p>\n

Per MacRumors<\/a>, among those incoming features is Visual Look Up, which is an existing Apple Intelligence<\/a> feature that surfaces information on things you point your camera at or photos on your phone. That feature has traditionally worked in Safari and the Photos\/Camera app and functions similarly to other computer vision-based lookup features seen in Pixel phones, as well as AI gadgets like Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.<\/a> Does this just mean AirPods will integrate better with Visual Look Up on your iPhone? Or is there a more pivotal (camera-based) AirPods upgrade at play here, too?<\/p>\n

See AirPods Pro 3 at Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n

There is also a reference to Contextual Reminders, according to MacRumors, which is another Apple Intelligence feature that uses AI to surface reminders based on stuff like location data. Theoretically, you could use this feature to set reminders like \u201cremind me to get milk when I\u2019m at the store\u201d or \u201cremind me to drink water when I\u2019m at the gym,\u201d but hopefully you don\u2019t need your phone to do the second one.<\/p>\n

\"Apple\u00a9 Adriano Contreras \/ Gizmodo<\/p>\n

Maybe the most mysterious AI feature reference in MacRumors\u2019 findings is \u201cConversationBreakthroughVQA,\u201d which may reference Intelligent Breakthrough, an Apple Intelligence feature that uses AI to determine when to break the parameters of your Focus modes or Do Not Disturb to deliver important notifications. I\u2019m not 100% sure on this one, though, since it doesn\u2019t actually reference \u201cIntelligent Breakthrough\u201d word for word. Maybe it\u2019s a similar feature that decides when to interrupt you with notification readouts while translating or listening to music? Maybe it\u2019s just Intelligent Breakthrough by a different internal name?<\/p>\n

One thing that piques my interest is the fact that it features \u201cVQA\u201d at the end, which could be a reference to \u201cvisual question answering,\u201d a technical way of describing computer vision that answers questions about your environment. Speaking of \u201cvisual,\u201d two of the three features are also setting off alarm bells with the context of rumors that Apple is considering including cameras in future versions of its AirPods<\/a>. Needless to say, both Visual Look Up and Conversation Breakthrough with \u201cVQA\u201d slapped on the end evoke computer vision and the cameras it requires. Maybe those camera pods really are around the corner?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all AI in the code reviewed by MacRumors. There\u2019s also a reference to \u201cprecise outdoor location understanding,\u201d which feels like a reference to some kind of AirTags-level location finding. While certain models of AirPods (AirPods Pro 2<\/a> and above, as well as AirPods Max<\/a>) have precision finding<\/a>, the range is currently limited. About 30 to 60 feet if you have AirPods Pro 2, and 200 feet if you have AirPods Pro 3<\/a> with Apple\u2019s U2 Ultra Wideband chip. That chip, for reference, is in the charging case, not the earbuds. It\u2019s hard to say if Apple plans on extending that range or if it just found a way to make the tracking more precise within that range, but it\u2019s hard to argue in either case since both could save your ass.<\/p>\n

Obviously, code references aren\u2019t much to go off, so a lot of this is still speculation, but if those bits of code are right, we won\u2019t have to wait very long to find out for sure what new features Apple has in store for AirPods.<\/p>\n

See AirPods Pro 3 at Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As I\u2019ve established previously, AI is coming for your wireless earbuds, whether you like it or not, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,59426,31108,276,277,328,49,48,18556,3690,61],"class_list":["post-350277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-airpods","tag-apple-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-audio","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-leaks","tag-rumors","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}