Know Who’s Calling With The Sony Xperia Ear Duo

While smart assistants have gotten a lot more clever that they used to be, they remain far from perfect. One area that still has a lot of room for improvement is hands-free voice control. If you’re driving and want to know who’s calling, most wireless headphones won’t let you know who’s on the line. And when you want to know what time it is, they can’t even tell you that.

But Sony wants to erase those limitations, and as such, it has updated its Xperia Ear Duo by giving it an artificial intelligence assistant. Well, sort of. It won’t hold a candle to, say, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, and it’s only available on Xperia devices, but it does have functionalities you can’t find on other smart assistants.

One example is the new Xperia Ear Duo Caller Name Read-out feature, which will inform you who’s calling so you can decide whether to accept or reject the call without having to whip out your phone. Another example is the feature that’ll tell you what time it is just by tapping the touchpad. You can even set it up to read notifications for you, like text messages. And you’ll be pleased to know that Sony has improved Adaptive Volume Control, which means you’ll get clearer calls even despite wind interference. There’s also the Dynamic Normalizer feature, which will boost the sound if an audio source is too quiet.

The best part? You all these new features whether you’re on Android or iOS. Hopefully other companies with their own wireless headphones take note of what Sony is doing.