We walked into the cafe, listening to a podcast on our TWS. The Barista at the cafe wished us a good morning. The podcast stopped, and ANC disappeared as our ears got filled with the sounds of the cafe – the coffee grinding machines, the tinkle of crockery, and, of course, the chatter of the customers. We got our coffee, sat down, and started watching an episode of our favorite show. At one stage, we burst out laughing. The show-stopped, and once again, our ears were filled with the noise that we were using ANC to block out. When we stepped out again, we switched to one of our favorite songs. It was infectious, and we started to hum along. The song stopped, and the sounds of the city took over.
This was our regular experience with one of the most hyped features in high-end TWS and headphones in recent times – conversation awareness. The feature had been available in headphones for a while but got into the spotlight when Sony introduced it in its legendary WH-1000XM series of headphones, calling it Speak-to-Chat. The core thinking behind the feature was eminently sensible – all ANC (active noise canceling) headphones came with microphones to detect external sound, so if they heard your voice speaking, they would pause whatever was being played and turn off ANC, allowing you to speak and also hear what was being said to you. The audio would resume the moment it sensed the conversation was over.
That sounds eminently sensible in theory. And so utterly high-tech. Your headphones or TWS are intelligent enough to sense when you are speaking and pause audio, and turn off ANC to let you speak and hear more easily. So considerate and convenient, isn’t it?
Well, in a word, no.
Because, like so many ideas in tech (remember those phone displays that used to switch off when they “sensed” you were not looking at them), this one too, sounded a whole lot better than it worked. It made perfect sense in theory, but it was a recipe for utter audio disaster in practical life.
The conversation awareness feature’s biggest flaw is that it assumes you are entering into a conversation every time you speak or utter a noise. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Many of us mutter, exclaim suddenly, hum, or even do things like coughing and sneezing. To have audio stop dead in your ears every time this happens can be disconcerting. Take our example – we like to read out what we are typing while writing stories, even while some music plays in our ears on a TWS or headphones. Well, the conversation awareness feature ensured that hardly any music got played, as it stopped whenever the microphones picked up our voices. It is not very handy in conversations, either. It would pause audio when we were speaking with someone else, but the moment there was a pause beyond 5-10 seconds in a conversation (and that can happen), we were surprised to hear music suddenly start playing in our headphones.
The worst part is that many high-end TWS and headphones do not just pause on hearing your voice but on hearing just about ANY human voice in the vicinity. Do not even get us into the audio mess they got us into when we visited a gym when the gentleman next to us was grunting and swearing extensively in an attempt to elevate his arms from the status of toothpicks to soft drink straws! To be fair, brands have recognized the issue and are trying to make microphones more sensitive to ensure that they do not get triggered by a loud voice in the background, and some brands are even trying to set levels of sensitivity to this feature so users can feel safe humming or making exclamations without losing audio.
The problem is that we do not think that they need to try so hard to improve or perfect the feature. Because this feature was brought in to address a problem that did not really exist. In most premium ANC TWS and headphones, pausing audio is as simple as tapping them or taking them off our ears. It has generally worked very smoothly, and best of all, it lets YOU decide when you want to pause audio and converse instead of the headphones/TWS trying to guess and hoping they guess right.
Yes, conversation awareness, speak-to-chat, or whatever the brands call it, will likely improve in the coming days. But even if it does, we would strongly advise turning it off. Be it in life in general or tech in particular. It is best to be in control of your own conversations and personal audio. Especially when doing so is a relatively simple task.
