A year after debuting on Kickstarter, and two months after they took up residence at the Coachella music festival, Doppler Labs's unique noise-filtering earbuds are finally ready for the masses.
The Here One earbuds, which are actually tiny computers complete with CPUs, sensors, speakers, and microphones, are available for pre-order today at $299 and will ship in November.
Harnessing the buds' computing power, engineers at Doppler Labs devised algorithms that do way more than just cancel noise. The technology identifies and targets individual sounds, and you can configure it to cancel out what you don't want to hear—sirens, baby cries, the like—while letting everything else in.
The company tested out the idea using pre-release versions of its earbuds at Coachella in April. There, festival goers who snagged one of 10,000 units on Kickstarter could use them as their own personal sound mixers at special "Here-optimized" stages.
That level of customization is still available on the Here One, but it adds adaptive filtering, meaning the software learns what you want to hear and what you don't, a bit like training Apple's Siri to better understand your speech.
In fact, Doppler hopes easier interaction with personal digital assistants like Siri and Microsoft's Cortana will be a key draw for the Here One thanks to its multiple microphones. That concept hasn't been lost on Apple, which recently patented super-accurate, vibration-sensing earbuds that respond to the wearer's vocal cord movements.
For now, though, Here One appears to be in a class all by itself, and at a price that rivals conventional noise-canceling earbuds from Bose.