Hearables Archives - Creative Connectivity

Let’s Applaud Plaud

PublishedSeptember 9, 2026
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For the last five or six years I’ve been bemoaning the fact that most of the audio industry has been ignoring one of the great earbud innovations – the battery box. When Bragi came up with the concept in 2014 it was a very necessary invention. Earbud batteries didn’t last more than an hour at most, so you needed a neat way to store and recharge them. Apple refined it into the form we know today with their first Airpods, after which it’s been more or less left as it is.

It’s always felt like an opportunity missed. There’s so much more you can do with it. With the greater versatility of earbuds using the new Bluetooth LE Audio specifications it can do volume and media control (and a few companies have got around to do that). With Auracast, it can be used to find and display the available broadcast audio streams around you. You can put in camera in it to scan QR codes to select music streams. (Apple filed a rather basic patent on that back in 2019, and there are rumours it might soon see the light of day). Or you can take advantage of the decent sized battery to add a cellular modem and SIM to provide a local access point for audio and data. So, I was really pleased to see Plaud do exactly that with their new Plaud One. They’ve put an AI agent into the battery box to let you make sense of conversations and summarise your day.

Hearing Loss at the Edinburgh Fringe

Ten years ago, there was virtually no mention of hearing loss at the Edinburgh Fringe, and very little to help anyone who had hearing loss. The Traverse, the main professional theatre that participates in the Fringe rather than the International Festival, had a hearing loop, but that was more or less it. Signing was limited and I don’t recall many shows exploring the effects of hearing loss or deafness until “Louder is not always Clearer” arrived on the Summerhall stage in 2019.

A lot has changed. After the interruption of Covid, the Edinburgh Deaf Festival https://www.creativescotland.com/news-stories/latest-news/archive/2026/07/fifth-edinburgh-deaf-festival—bigger-brighter-bolder-than-ever came into existence. Celebrating deaf culture, language and heritage, it runs as an integral part of the Fringe. This was its fifth year, where it had grown to 80 events. Equally importantly, a recognition of hearing loss has become more obvious in the mainstream. In the first week of the Fringe, Dundee Rep’s excellent show “The Singer” won a well-deserved Fringe First Award. It was an object lesson in how to put BSL, captioning and deaf experience together on stage for every audience member. It was a brilliant example of how to do it properly and tell an important story in a way that everyone could appreciate.

Anyone for Stereo Tennis?

With Wimbledon upon us again, I was reminded that one of the use cases we considered when we were designing Bluetooth LE Audio was based on a tennis audience at Centre Court. Despite all of the money and technology that goes into international tournaments like Wimbledon, the sound reinforcement design provided for spectators still hasn’t evolved to the level of the original TV tennis games of the 1960s.

Looking at the spectators sitting in the main courts, it looks as if they’re aging, possibly because you need a hefty Civil Service defined-benefits pension to afford the tickets. Which mean that a fair number will have hearing loss. According to Wimbledon’s Access Guides, there are Hearing Loops located at key points around the grounds, but it doesn’t mention if they’re in the courts. Even if they are. reinforcing sound for a tennis audience poses some interesting questions.

Arturo Ui, Electric Guitars and Hearing Aids

The Royal Shakespeare Company are currently running an excellent production of Brecht’s play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I can thoroughly recommend. What I didn’t expect when I went to see it last week, is that I’d also learn quite a few useful things about user experience design for hearing aids and assisted listening.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a parable of Hitler’s rise to power, conceived as a parallel story based on Chicago gangsters fighting for control of the vegetable trade. It’s an important piece, not least because of the warning of its final line “The beast that bore him is in heat again”. But enough of UI for the moment. Here’s what I learnt about User Interfaces for hearing aids.

Apple’s AirPod dilemma

What do you do if you’ve just designed a great product, but then realised that it’s missing a key feature that everyone is about to start asking for? That’s the dilemma Apple had with its latest AirPods Max 2 headset, which is missing a new Bluetooth capability called Auracast. Auracast is rapidly approaching critical mass – appearing in other consumer products a lot faster than Apple had anticipated.

TVs take the lead in Audio Innovation

It’s almost ten years since the last major innovation in consumer audio, which was Apple’s launch of its AirPods back in 2016. Those arrived on the market ten years after the underlying Bluetooth specification which made wireless audio streaming possible, which demonstrates the fact that it can take quite a long time to bring new technologies to market. This year looks as if it will be the tipping point for the next big audio innovation to go mainstream. It’s something called Auracast and this time, the innovation is being spearheaded by the TV industry.