3 earbud features I immediately turn off

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has ever used a product feature and wondered if the person who designed it actually used it in the real world. More and more, I’m finding new features to be solutions in search of a problem. Sure, they might help some people, and if that’s you, I genuinely want to know more about it, but for me, when I get a new pair of wireless earbuds, I turn off these three features right away: auto-play and pause, automatic speech detection, and spoken battery warnings.

Autoplay and pause

Nearly every pair of earbuds over $50 now ships with wear detection turned on by default. The idea is simple: pop an earbud in, and your audio starts playing automatically. Pull it out, and it pauses. When it works, it’s a nice time saver. You don’t have to dig out your phone and hit play a dozen times a day, and pausing to answer a quick question is effortless.

The problem is that auto-play has no sense of context. It resumes instantly, no matter how long you’ve been away. Put an earbud back in after a few minutes, and you’re dropped into the middle of a podcast with no idea what’s going on, or music suddenly blasts at full volume. It gets even worse if you use more than one audio app, where your earbuds seem to flip a coin between resuming YouTube or Spotify. I’d rather just press play myself and know exactly what I’m getting.

Automatic speech detection

This feature goes by a few names: Sony calls it Speak-to-Chat, Apple calls it Conversation Awareness, and Samsung calls it Voice Detect. They all do the same thing. When the earbuds detect that you’re talking, they automatically lower your audio and let outside sound in, so you can have a conversation without removing anything. On paper, it’s a seamless transition from listening to chatting.

In practice, it’s far too sensitive. I haven’t found a version yet that can reliably tell when I’m actually talking to someone. Every hum, sigh, or throat-clear drops the volume of my music. If you mutter to yourself like every sane person, or scream along to your favorite tunes like a madman, prepare for your audio to duck constantly. It’s a neat trick if you sit in total silence, but for everyone else, it interrupts far more conversations than it enables.

Spoken battery warnings

Knowing your battery is low is useful. Being interrupted mid-podcast by a robotic voice announcing “battery level is low, please charge the unit” is not. Some earbuds start nagging you with a warning when over an hour of battery life remains, then repeat the warning every five minutes. Low battery means I have to charge? Oh really? I hadn’t noticed the last ten times you mentioned it.

A simple notification tone would do the job, and to be fair, some earbuds let you swap the voice for a chime (the first setting I hunt for). It would also help if the warning only kicked in during the last 10 to 30 minutes of battery, when it’s actually urgent. The one upside: if you listen to podcasts at 2x speed, the warning plays at normal speed, so at least you get a hilarious reminder of how slow the rest of the world talks.