Remember when the rumor mill of those AirPods Pro with cameras started swirling? We may be waiting a while longer for them, but outside of Apple’s ecosystem, Qualcomm’s just launched the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 silicon to support the devices that will compete with them.

Beyond lossless sound enhancements, ambient ANC, and enhanced voice clarity, this chip is all about multimodal AI with camera support, alongside support for agentic AI.

So let me get straight into it, as there are some wins here. Packed into a 30% smaller footprint with 40% lower power consumption, this is bringing intelligence to premium earbuds, camera buds, audio glasses, headphones, AI wearables and more.

It starts with aptX lossless audio support, new AI enhanced ANC that adapts to your ambient surroundings, a new AI-turbocharged microphone pickup algorithm to improve voice pick-up.

This means an EQ that can change slightly around where you are, alongside local models that can let important sounds through the ANC wall (like sirens).

And for the cherry on top, there’s now integrated micro-power WiFi 6E — a world first for a headphone chip that means you could connect to cloud audio directly from the device.

But let’s get into the big thing of Sound Elite Gen 2: that new local intelligence built right in. Qualcomm’s packed this with up to 2x greater AI capability than its predecessor, ready to fuel the next generation of on-camera equipped form factors (translation: all the AirPods with cameras built in for Siri vision).

Plus with that direct-to-cloud connectivity, it can support a breadth of AI services both locally and on-cloud. This will take earbuds beyond your standard voice assistant into something a little more agentic thanks to that built-in NPU and an ecosystem of apps and agents built specifically for the chip.

This is the big question here. My tech nerd take is of course that this is a solid silicon upgrade for upcoming devices. But we’ve come to realize a lot more about the privacy issues that come with AI smart glasses or always-on recorders.

So now that we’re seeing these kinds of devices in a whole new light — a light where we’re much more aware of how much of our lives are being used to train AI models, and the rise in covert recording — is this a case of bad timing? Would you want to buy a pair of camera buds?

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