Apple AirPods Pro: Personalised volume, adaptive audio make it a cool musical affair

The new AirPods Pro are a rather peculiar product. On the face of it, not much has changed. In fact, just one thing has changed — the AirPods Pro charging case now comes with a Type-C port instead of the lightning port.

The change too has been forced on Apple and not done voluntarily. Then what was the need for new AirPods? It is
a case of Apple flexing its software and machine learning prowess. Apple conspicuously avoids the A-word (artificial intelligence) and prefers the term machine learning.


The three key software features are Adaptive Audio, Personalised Volume, and Conversation Awareness.

Let’s start with the last on the list, which is also the coolest feature of the three. The idea behind Conversation Awareness is to have small talk without removing the AirPods. As soon as you start speaking — and are listening to music on the AirPods — the music volume automatically reduces and the transparency mode kicks in so that you
can hear the conversation around you.

The background noise is also reduced so that you can be a part of the conversation. It is quite remarkable how every time it smartly recognises that it’s your voice and your voice only which triggers the mode.

The Adaptive Audio mode is a combination of transparency mode and active noise cancellation mode. It blocks a good amount of noise — not completely — and yet manages to give you a fair idea of what’s happening around you.

Personalised volume is something that will automatically set the volume depending on your past preferences.
AirPods Pro are priced at `24,999 and are all about the software. The same features will also be available in the second gen AirPods Pro (lighting port).