Wisear is building neural earbuds that skip tracks when you clench your jaw | Engadget

Plenty of true wireless earbuds allow to control music or query your phone with a voice command, but Wisear is taking the hands-free experience a step further. The company is working on what it calls “the first neural sensing wireless earbuds,” a true wireless set that allows you to control tunes with actions like clenching your jaw. After showing of the tech that drives its first model at CES last year, the company is back with an actual set of earbuds to demo controls based on the movement of facial muscles. 

Wisear says electrodes inside monitor brain, eye and facial activity using AI to translate those into controls. The company is showing off two items here at CES — play/pause and skipping tracks — both of which are done by clenching your jaw (once or twice respectively). Wisear says that by the end of the year, the first controls using eye activity, which it demoed with two wired prototype earbuds here in Vegas, will be ready. It also plans to debut its first controls based on brain activity next year. The company says once that full suite of actions is ready, it will debut its first consumer product — also currently slated for 2024. 

Eventually the plan is to offer this suite of tech to other earbud companies and use the hands-free methods for things like AR. And despite the bulky housing on the prototype, the finished set will apparently look more like what we’re used to seeing in true wireless earbuds. Wisear says the goal is to bring what makes earbuds convenient to its model and that battery life should also be comparable to the industry average nowadays. That means that even with the extra tech onboard you should be able to get somewhere in the five hour range on a charge.