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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.

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.

Introducing Bluetooth LE Audio – the book

Just before Christmas, the Bluetooth SIG published the final documents in the first release of Bluetooth LE Audio. It’s been the largest single development in the history of the Bluetooth specifications, taking around eight years and comprising 25 new or updated documents, with over 1,250 pages of specification. Its aim is ambitious, the intent being to provide the platform for the next twenty years of wireless audio development.

Removing the Stigma from Hearing Aids

With the meteoric rise in the sale of earbuds, there’s an increasing amount of speculation about what this means for the hearing aid market. Most miss the fundamental difference, which is that earbuds are selling in the hundreds of millions because consumers like them, whereas hearing aids are still seen by many as a product of last resort, because there is a stigma attached to them. That means that most people with hearing loss don’t go for a hearing test until around ten years after they should. If we could get rid of that stigma, and make hearing aids as popular as earbuds, life would be very much better for hundreds of millions of people.

Hearing aids are not the first products to have a stigma. I’m old enough to remember a similar situation with glasses. A child with a sight impairment would do everything they could not to admit it, lest they were labelled “four-eyes” or “speccy” by their classmates. Most children’s books up to the 1960s had a glasses-wearing child as the scapegoat of the story. Then John Lennon came along and all of a sudden, glasses were cool. Nobody could quite explain why, but glasses changed from being something you tried not to wear to being a multi-billion dollar fashion industry, which conveniently managed to restore your sight at the same time. Whilst the arrival of contact lenses threated their existence, glasses resisted the competition and remain immensely popular. You no longer make a spectacle of yourself by wearing them, and nobody would consider them as a “seeing-aid”. So how is that changing for hearing aids?

The Hearables Market – a Covid Update

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Dickens’ could have written that opening line to preface an account of the Covid year for the hearables industry. Over the last six months consumer demand for earbuds has risen to an unprecedented level. In contrast, hearing aid manufacturers have been dealt a body blow, with sales tumbling by up to 75%. As one industry executive put it “we’d have done better if we were an airline”. Covid has also had unexpected effects on the service industries which have been traditional drivers of hearables growth. Audio streaming services like Spotify have seen listening times go down, while video streaming and video conferencing have experienced unprecedented demand.

As countries came out of lockdown during the summer, we saw further shifts in usage, but it’s apparent that overall, hearables have done well out of the crisis. That trend looks set to continue as we face a second wave of the pandemic and further lockdowns.

Hearables market to reach $80 billion in 2025

Who could have guessed, back in 2014, that a Kickstarter campaign would lead to an $80 billion market segment in just over a decade? But that’s what is happening with hearables, where a new report predicts that it will reach that size in 2025.

The growth of earbuds, which are now the “must-have” hearable for around 80 million users, has turned into the fastest growing consumer electronics product sector ever, eclipsing even the iPhone. That growth is set to accelerate even more with the launch of a new Bluetooth LE Audio standard at CES 2020, which allows designers even more freedom, higher quality and new audio applications.

It all started when Bragi managed to raise almost $3.4m dollars for a new concept – a set of stereo earbuds which could stream music as well as measuring your vital signs. A raft of other startups managed to raise over $50 million in crowdfunding investment between them before Apple arrived with their AirPods, and the rest is history.