Technologies

Amazon’s New Echo Buds Have 2 Key Features That Other Cheap Earbuds Lack

Amazon’s stick-style AirPods 3 alternative, the Echo Buds 2023, are on sale for $35 in an early Prime Day deal. Here’s what makes them special.

I like to test a lot of inexpensive true-wireless earbuds, hoping to find some hidden gems to pass on to CNET readers as good bargains. With that in mind, I was eager to try Amazon’s new Echo Buds 2023, which carry a list price of $50 but are currently selling for $35 in an early Prime Day deal. That puts them firmly in the «cheap» earbuds category.

Interestingly, they impressed me in a few ways that I wasn’t expecting. For starters, they sound good for inexpensive open earbuds, delivering decent clarity and ample bass. And by «open,» I mean that they don’t have silicone ear tips that you jam into your ears (buds like that are called noise-isolating ear buds). However, they do feature a rubber ring around their 12mm speaker driver, along with a translucent removable silicone rubber cover that fits over the bud itself (you can choose to add it or remove it). Both those design elements help you get a more secure fit, though like all earbuds, the Echo Buds 2023 won’t fit every ear equally well. But they stayed in my ears better than Apple’s AirPods 3 and they’re also lightweight like the AirPods and include a compact charging case.

The Echo Buds 2023 are a good AirPods 3 alternative for less

Read more: Best open wireless earbuds for 2023

The Echo Buds 2023 aren’t so different from 1More’s Comfobuds 2 ($30) for example, which also feature a rubber ring or truncated ear tip around their speaker drivers. But what sets the Echo Buds 2023 apart are a couple of key features that you’ll rarely find in a set of $35 earbuds.

The first is an ear-detection sensor on each bud that automatically pauses your music when you take one or both buds out of your ears. Your music resumes playback when you return the bud(s) to your ears, and you can use a single bud independently of the other if you want. (At around $43 and sometimes less, another set of budget open earbuds that I recommend, the Soundpeats Air 3 Deluxe HS, also have ear-detection sensors, as well as support for the LDAC audio codec for devices that support it.)

The second key feature is hands-free Alexa, which allows you to issue voice commands like «next track» and «lower volume» and control Alexa-enabled smart home products just by saying the Alexa wake word. With most cheap earbuds, you have to press a button to activate your voice-assistant (you can opt to use Siri or Google Assistant with the Echo Buds but there’s no hands-free option for those voice assistants, as Amazon would prefer you to use Alexa).

The Amazon Echo Buds 2023 feature a stick design like the AirPods 3

Beyond those two key features, the buds also feature a voice accelerometer that detects when you’re speaking and that helps people hear your voice more clearly when you’re making calls. (Amazon says the buds have two microphones to pick up your voice.) The buds do a reasonable job reducing background noise but callers said they could hear some traffic and other ambient noise during my calls. But my voice did come through clearly, rising above the ambient sound. Since these are open earbuds, they do let in a fair amount of ambient noise, so it’s harder to hear callers — and any other audio you’re listening to — in noisy environments. But the buds do offer ample volume.

Additionally, you get multipoint Bluetooth pairing (Bluetooth 5.2) so you can pair the buds to two devices simultaneously and automatically switch audio between them. For instance, if you’re using these with a computer and a call comes in on your smartphone, you can answer the call and the buds will switch from your computer’s audio to your smartphone’s. (You have to pair to a second device using the Alexa companion app.)

Other specs are in line with what you get from most other inexpensive earbuds. You get up to 5 hours of listening time from a single charge with an additional three charges in the case (the buds also have a quick-charge feature). They’re IPX4 splashproof and sweat-resistant, so you can use them for working out. That said, after going on a run in hot weather, I did pull off the silicone covers on the buds to wipe everything down because some moisture seemed to be trapped under the covers.

I should also note that I had a little trouble initially setting up the buds using the Alexa app with my iPhone 14 Pro (you can also use these just fine with Android devices). I’ve encountered this issue before — the app seems to hang and fails to recognize the Echo Buds because I have so many Bluetooth devices in my Bluetooth list. It took me a few tries and a phone restart before the buds showed up in the Alexa app. Once they did, everything worked well. You can tweak the sound profile a bit using the app’s equalizer settings and customize the touch controls to your liking. There’s also a locate feature similar to Apple’s Find My feature for its AirPods.

To be clear, the Echo Buds 2023 don’t offer the greatest sound quality — but they’re good for the price. Their sound falls short of that of Apple’s AirPods 3, which deliver fuller bass and overall fuller sound. But the AirPods 3 cost more than four times as much as the Echo Buds 2023 and offer only about 15 to 20% better audio. In short, if you’re looking for open earbuds — or «semi-open» as these types of earbuds are sometimes called — the Echo Buds are good value at their $50 list price and even easier to recommend at $35 on sale.

Technologies

How Much Energy Do Your AI Prompts Consume? Google Just Shared Its Gemini Numbers

Current measurements of AI’s impact aren’t telling the full story. Google has offered a new method it hopes to standardize.

The explosion of AI tools worldwide is increasing exponentially, but the companies that make these tools often don’t express their environmental impact in detail.

Google has just released a technical paper detailing measurements for energy, emissions and water use of its Gemini AI prompts. The impact of a single prompt is, it says, minuscule. According to its methodology for measuring AI’s impact, a single prompt’s energy consumption is about the equivalent of watching TV for less than 9 seconds.

That’s quite in a single serving, except when you consider the variety of chatbots being used, with billions of prompts easily sent every day.

On the more positive side of progress, the technology behind these prompts has become more efficient. Over the past 12 months, the energy of a single Gemini text prompt has been reduced by 33x, and the total carbon footprint has been reduced by 44x, Google says. According to the tech giant, that’s not unsubstantial, and it’s a momentum that will need to be maintained going forward.

Google did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for further comment.

Google’s calculation method considers much more

The typical calculation for the energy cost of an AI prompt ends at the active machine it’s been run on, which shows a much smaller per-prompt footprint. But Google’s method for measuring the impact of a prompt purportedly spans a much wider range of factors that paint a clearer picture, including full-system dynamic power, idle machines, data center overhead, water consumption and more.

For comparison, it’s estimated that only using the active TPU and GPU consumption, a single Gemini prompt uses 0.10 watt-hours of energy, 0.12 milliliters of water and emits 0.02 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent. This is a promising number, but Google’s wider methodology tells a different story. With more considerations in place, a Gemini text prompt uses 0.24Wh of energy, 0.26mL of water and emits 0.03 gCO2e — around double across the board.

Will new efficiencies keep up with AI use?

Through a multilayered series of efficiencies, Google is continually working on ways to make AI’s impact less burdensome, from more efficient model architectures and data centers to custom hardware.

With smarter models, use cases and tools emerging daily, those efficiencies will be critical as we immerse ourselves deeper in this AI reality.

For more, you should stop using ChatGPT for these things.

Technologies

Vivo Launches Mixed-Reality Headset, an Apple Vision Pro Competitor

Vivo Vision has many of the same design elements as Apple’s VR/AR, but is only available in China, for now.

Look-alikes of Apple products often pop up in China, and mixed-reality headsets have now joined the party. Chinese smartphone maker Vivo has introduced the Vivo Vision, a headset mixing both AR and VR, and it bears many similarities to the Apple Vision Pro.

The company announced the Vivo Vision Discovery Edition at its 30th anniversary celebration in Dongguan, China, saying it’s «the first MR product developed by a smartphone manufacturer in China, positioning Vivo as the first Chinese company to operate within both the smartphone and MR product sectors.»

The Vivo Vision, currently only an in-store experience in mainland China, has a curved glass visor, an aluminum external battery pack and downward-pointing cameras like the Vision Pro. But it also has some differences — an 180-degree panoramic field of view and a much lighter weight at 398 grams (versus the Vision Pro’s 650 grams).

CNET asked Vivo if it plans to sell the Vivo Vision to non-China markets, but the company did not immediately respond.

The Vivo Vision runs on OriginOS Vision, Vivo’s mixed-reality operating system. It supports 3D video recording, spatial photos and audio, and a 120-foot cinematic screen experience.

The starting cost in China will be $1,395 (converted to US dollars), compared to the Vision Pro at $3,500.

Even if the Vivo Vision came to the consumer market in the US, it might not matter much to Apple’s bottom line. The Vision Pro hasn’t been a big seller, likely because of the price tag. Still, the headset market is expected to grow quickly over the next several years, and Apple is already working on new versions of the Vision Pro, including one that’s more affordable than the original.

Jon Rettinger, a tech influencer with more than 1.65 million YouTube subscribers, says he’s not overly enthusiastic about VR/AR just yet. «It’s heavy, invasive and without a must-have use case,» Rettinger told CNET. «If the technology can go from goggles to glasses, I think we’ll see a significant rise. But if the current form factors stay, it will always be niche.

The YouTuber loves that the technology exists, but still doesn’t use it. «The honeymoon wore off. Aside from some gaming and content viewing, it’s still cumbersome, and I tend to go back to my laptop,» he said.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Aug. 22 #537

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Aug. 22, No. 537.

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

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle has a fun theme, especially if you have ever read Agatha Christie books or played a few rounds of the board game Clue. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Whodunit?

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Solve the crime

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

REST, POEM, SOUR, SOURS, DIAL, HOLE, VOLE, ROLE, ROLES, VOLES, HOLES, DEEM, GAIT, SAME

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

HEIR, LOVER, RIVAL, SPOUSE, STRANGER, DETECTIVE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is ITSAMYSTERY, with all the answers being characters common to mystery novels. To find it, look for the I that’s the farthest left letter on the top row, and wind down.