Dig out an old pair of wired earphones, the white ones that used to come free with a phone, cable slightly discoloured near the jack, one ear a touch quieter than the other, and plug them in expecting to laugh at how dated they sound.
More often than not, they sound fine. Not great, but fine. What stands out is how differently they behave compared to earbuds used today. They simply play. Whatever's in the file comes out of the driver, and that's the end of the transaction. No app, no firmware update, no chime confirming a connection.
That gap is essentially the whole subject.
One tuning, shipped to everybody
Traditional audio worked a certain way, and to be fair, it worked well for close to a century.
A team of engineers would sit in a treated room with measurement rigs and decide how a pair of headphones should sound. They'd tune the frequency response, debate the bass, settle on something, and that exact tuning would go into every single unit that left the factory. Same curve for a 19-year-old in a hostel and a 55-year-old on a flight. Same curve for someone with wide ear canals and someone whose left ear never quite seals.
The device had no way of knowing where it was, who was wearing it, or what was happening around it. There was nothing built in to know with. That's not a flaw, it's simply how the physics and economics worked at the time. But it does mean every traditional pair of headphones is a compromise, tuned for an average listener who doesn't really exist.
What changed is that the device started deciding continuously
The shift isn't that AI earbuds necessarily sound better, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. The real shift is that the tuning decision moved from a lab, fixed once, to the ear itself, adjusting every few milliseconds.
Noise cancellation is the clearest example. Older ANC ran on one fixed profile, effective on a flight, since plane noise is a steady, predictable drone, but considerably less effective in a market, in traffic, or when drilling starts two floors below. Adaptive systems continuously sample the surrounding environment, work out what kind of noise it is, and adjust cancellation to suit. Traffic rumble and a colleague's mechanical keyboard call for completely different treatment, and a fixed profile can only ever be tuned for one of them.
Fit is a factor that deserves more attention than it usually gets. A large share of "weak ANC" complaints actually come down to a poor seal rather than a poor system. Newer earbuds measure what's actually reaching the eardrum and compensate accordingly, a detail that sounds minor but makes a bigger difference than most spec-sheet features.
Calls are another place the difference shows up immediately. Older noise reduction on a mic worked essentially like a gate, below a certain signal threshold, mute it, which is why the other person often heard cutting in and out. Newer models separate the speaker's voice from everything else, and on better earbuds, a small sensor detects jaw vibration so the device knows precisely who's speaking versus who's talking nearby. Anyone who's taken a work call from a moving vehicle in this country understands exactly why that matters.
Then there's the personalisation layer. Some earbuds now run a short hearing test, identify which frequencies the listener is weaker on, and adjust the response accordingly. Hearing genuinely changes with age and exposure, and no factory tuning can account for that. Spatial audio with head tracking sits in the same bucket too, though it currently reads as more impressive than useful.
From smart earbud to something closer to a companion
If adaptive ANC was the first step and personalisation the second, the third step is already visible, the earbud stops being just a listening device and starts becoming a place where you talk to an AI directly.
boAt's Crest AI is a good example of where this is headed, and it's worth noting because it's happening here, not in some Silicon Valley lab. Crest AI is boAt's own proprietary AI platform, built to sit inside its next generation of earbuds and headphones. The idea is fairly simple to state: instead of the earbud being a passive pipe between your phone and your ear, it becomes something you can actually speak to. Ask a question mid-commute, get real-time information, have something translated or explained, receive assistance that's tuned to you, all through voice, without fishing the phone out of your pocket every two minutes.
The part that genuinely matters for this market is the language piece. Crest AI is designed to understand and respond across multiple Indian languages and dialects, which most global assistants have historically treated as an afterthought. For a country where a single household might switch between two or three languages before breakfast, an AI companion that only works properly in polished English was always going to have limited use. Building for that reality from day one, rather than retrofitting it later, is the sensible order of operations.
What boAt is essentially attempting is to combine its hardware and software with AI capabilities and push earbuds into a new category altogether, from a device for listening and calls into an always-available, hands-free AI companion. Whether that category fully arrives is something the next couple of years will decide. But it's the logical endpoint of everything described above: once the device is already sensing, processing and adapting continuously, letting you talk to it directly is not a leap, it's the next obvious step.
The honest caveat applies here as everywhere else in this piece: a companion is only as useful as it is reliable, and the same trade-offs around battery, app dependence and data will follow it. The promise, though, an AI you wear rather than one you hold, is not a small one.
What hasn't changed at all
This is the part marketing tends to skip.
Drivers are still drivers. The physical transducer, the acoustic chamber, the fit of the tip in the ear, these still set the ceiling on how good anything can actually sound. No amount of processing rescues a poor driver. It can smooth out a rough response curve; it cannot invent detail that was never captured.
Wired still wins on latency and on not needing charge. For video editing or anything rhythm-based, wireless remains a compromise, even with low-latency modes. A wired pair from ten years ago will still work in ten more years. A smart earbud is a small computer with a battery, likely degraded within three years and unsupported within five. That trade-off has been broadly accepted without much scrutiny, and it's worth questioning.
There's also a purist argument worth taking seriously rather than dismissing outright. Every processing layer is effectively a decision made about how the music should sound, a decision the artist and mixing engineer had already made. For listeners who care about hearing exactly what was recorded, more intelligence isn't automatically an improvement. It can be interference, however well-intentioned.
The practical trade-offs
Battery life comes first. Constant listening and processing draws power, and adaptive ANC drains faster than fixed ANC. An always-available voice companion, by definition, is always drawing something. Manufacturers typically quote figures with everything switched off, which doesn't reflect real usage.
Dependence on the app is real too. Traditional headphones needed nothing at all. Smart ones usually require an app, sometimes an account, and firmware updates that occasionally make things worse before they improve. If a company stops supporting a model, certain features simply disappear.
And then there's the data question, a device with microphones that adapts to its environment, and now one that you actively converse with, is by definition a device collecting information about that environment and those conversations. Worth checking what leaves the earbud and what stays on it.
So which should you actually buy
For commuting, taking calls in noisy environments, or moving between different settings through the day, adaptive features genuinely earn their place, the difference becomes noticeable within a week. And if the idea of a hands-free AI companion appeals, asking, translating, getting things done in your own language while your hands are on the handlebars, platforms like Crest AI are exactly the kind of thing to watch.
For listening in one quiet room, a good traditional pair at the same price point will very likely sound better, simply because the budget went into the driver rather than into chips, mics and battery. That trade-off is real, even if it isn't advertised.
For most people, realistically, both have a place, one pair that adapts, converses and keeps up with the day outside, and one pair that simply plays, for focused listening.
Which brings the point back to those old white earphones sitting in a drawer somewhere. They're not necessarily better. But there's something to be said for a device with exactly one opinion about how something should sound, and no interest in changing it.
