Technologies

Headphone Conversation Awareness Mode: How It Works and Why You Need It

Taking off your headphones for a quick chat is practically Stone Age. Try conversation awareness mode to make things more seamless and truly hands-free.

Listening to your tunes, but your neighbor is feeling chatty? Ordering a latte but your hands are full so you can’t pause your podcast? Conversation detection, a feature on some headphones and earphones, can be a game-changer. Instead of removing your active noise-canceling earbuds or using your hands to pause the audio, this handy feature detects voices, pauses the audio and turns off the noise canceling.

That seamlessness between the cozy comfort of noise cancellation and the bustling real world is extremely helpful and easy to set up. There are, however, a few important things to note for the best experience with automatic conversation detection.

Most noise-canceling earbuds, including those from Bose and many other manufacturers, have a mode called Aware, Awareness or Transparency. This boosts ambient sound, often in the vocal frequency ranges. What I’m talking about here is a detection feature that makes switching to this mode automatic instead of having to manually select it.

You’ll generally see this feature on flagship headphones from Apple, Sony, Google and Samsung. Each one calls it something slightly different: Apple has Conversation Awareness, Samsung has Voice Detect, Google has Conversation Detection and Sony’s got Speak-to-Chat.

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How it works

Enable

Conversation modes are generally accessible in the settings for your headphone’s companion app. If your phone and headphones are both Apple or both Google, go into the phone’s settings and access this feature by tapping on your headphones. Always be sure to update all of your devices’ firmware. Apple iOS also provides access to Conversation Awareness via the Control Center that appears when you swipe down from the top of the screen.

Detect

The array of tiny microphones built into your earbuds or headphones for calls and noise canceling will detect your voice for an awareness mode. Many headphones have built-in accelerometers for features like head tracking and on-ear/head detection; these might also be used to pick up jaw movement to verify that it’s you speaking and not someone nearby.

Samsung has a separate but related Siren Detect feature that automatically turns on Transparency mode when a siren is detected, so you can hear what’s going on in an emergency. (Some brands do the opposite and crank up the ANC when a loud sound is detected.)

Auto-adjust audio

Once activated, awareness modes also either pause or lower the volume of whatever audio is currently playing. This behavior differs by brand. For example, Apple devices lower music audio but pause podcasts. Samsung, instead, lowers all audio, while Sony and Google devices both pause all audio. Ideally, you’d be able to choose the behavior, but currently that’s still rare. Apple adds Conversation Boost, which uses the mics and accelerometers to amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to via head tracking.

End chat and resume

Then, either through some technological wizardry or simply by sensing when you stop talking (adjustable on some brands, including Sony), the headphones detect that the conversation has ended and revert to the previous audio, at the same volume and in the same noise-cancellation mode. Many models are better than people at detecting the end of a conversation.

Any model with this feature will also let you toggle the conversation mode on/off manually with a long button press or similar action.

The fine print

Conversation detection is triggered by your voice, not someone else’s, so you may wind up asking people to repeat themselves when you notice they’re talking to you. This asking will trigger conversation mode. Depending on how a specific model’s detection works, it might require both earbuds to be in your ears for it to work.

Sometimes, conversation detection can be triggered inadvertently by coughing, singing along to music, or other random ambient sounds. It may also not work well in extremely noisy environments, such as construction sites and airplanes. Some models do let you adjust the sensitivity, which is something we’d like to see more of in firmware updates and future releases.

Frequent podcast or audiobook listeners should choose headphones that pause all audio for conversations, or at least handle it intelligently by distinguishing between audio types and pausing podcasts or audiobooks so you don’t miss anything. However, Apple and Samsung won’t pause videos from services like Netflix or YouTube; they just lower the audio.

As with all features that use sensors and mics, conversation detection will affect battery life to some degree, though it’s not a major drain.

The final verdict

Conversation detection modes aren’t for everyone, especially exuberant souls who talk to themselves at full volume, yell at the news or sing along with their tunes. If you reflexively take your earbuds out to talk to others, you also don’t need this feature — unless you want to change that habit.

In the future, I’d like to see more adjustability, but even how this feature is implemented in the current crop of headphones and earbuds, it’s an excellent upgrade to the seamlessness of digital life.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, Dec. 24

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Dec. 24.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I’m Irish-American, but yet 6-Down, which involves Ireland, stumped me at first. Read on for all the answers.. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Wordle or Boggle
Answer: GAME

5A clue: Big Newton
Answer: ISAAC

7A clue: Specialized vocabulary
Answer: LINGO

8A clue: «See you in a bit!»
Answer: LATER

9A clue: Tone of many internet comments
Answer: SNARK

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Sharks use them to breathe
Answer: GILLS

2D clue: From Singapore or South Korea, say
Answer: ASIAN

3D clue: Large ocean ray
Answer: MANTA

4D clue: ___ beaver
Answer: EAGER

6D clue: Second-largest city in the Republic of Ireland, after Dublin
Answer: CORK

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Technologies

Quadrantids Is a Short but Sweet Meteor Shower Just After New Year’s. How to See It

This meteor shower has one of the most active peaks, but it doesn’t last for very long.

The Quadrantids has the potential to be one of the most active meteor showers of the year, and skygazers won’t have long to wait to see it. The annual shower is predicted to reach maximum intensity on Jan. 3. And with a display that can rival Perseids, Quadrantids could be worth braving the cold to see it.

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The show officially begins on Dec. 28 and lasts until Jan. 12, according to the American Meteor Society. Quadrantids is scheduled to peak on Jan. 2-3, when it may produce upwards of 125 meteors per hour. This matches Perseids and other larger meteor showers on a per-hour rate, but Quadrantids also has one of the shortest peaks at just 6 hours, so it rarely produces as many meteors overall as the other big ones.

The meteor shower comes to Earth courtesy of the 2003 EH1 asteroid, which is notable because most meteor showers are fed from comets, not asteroids. Per NASA, 2003 EH1 is a near-Earth asteroid that orbits the sun once every five and a half years. Science posits that 2003 EH1 was a comet in a past life, but too many trips around the sun stripped it of its ice, leaving only its rocky core. The Earth runs through EH1’s orbital debris every January, which results in the Quadrantids meteor shower.

How and where to see Quadrantids

Quadrantids is named for the constellation where its meteors appear to originate, a point known as the radiant. This presents another oddity, as the shower originates from the constellation Quadrans Muralis. This constellation ceased to be recognized as an official constellation in the 1920s and isn’t available on most publicly accessible sky maps.

For the modern skygazer, you’ll instead need to find the Bootes and Draco constellations, both of which contain stars that were once a part of the Quadrans Muralis. Draco will be easier to find after sunset on the evening of Jan. 2, and will be just above the horizon in the northern sky. Bootes orbits around Draco, but will remain under the horizon until just after 1 a.m. local time in the northeastern sky. From that point forward, both will sit in the northeastern part of the sky until sunrise. You’ll want to point your chair in that direction and stay there to see meteors.

As the American Meteor Society notes, Quadrantids has a short but active peak, lasting around 6 hours. The peak is expected to start around 4 p.m. ET and last well into the evening. NASA predicts the meteor shower to start one day later on Jan. 3-4, so if you don’t see any on the evening of Jan. 2, try again on Jan. 3.

To get the best results, the standard space viewing tips apply. You’ll want to get as far away from the city and suburbs as possible to reduce light pollution. Since it’ll be so cold outside, dress warmly and abstain from alcoholic beverages, as they can affect your body temperature. You won’t need any binoculars or telescopes, and the reduced field of view may actually impact your ability to see meteors.

The bad news is that either way, the Quadrantids meteor shower coincides almost perfectly with January’s Wolf Moon, which also happens to be a supermoon. This will introduce quite a lot of light pollution, which will likely drown out all but the brightest meteors. So, while it may have a peak of over 100 meteors per hour, both NASA and the AMS agree that the more realistic expectation is 10 or so bright meteors per hour.

Technologies

Today’s Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for Dec. 24, #1649

Here are hints and the answer for today’s Wordle for Dec. 24, No. 1,649.

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle is a little tricky, with a double letter that could confuse players. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.