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Earbuds aren’t all about playing the best music, anymore. Productivity-minded earbuds are a thing — sacrificing some audio quality for rich integrations with videoconferencing software or AI-powered transcription features.
I recently reviewed another pair like this: the Epos Adapt E1 earbuds, which are optimized for video calls, and I praised their handy gestures. But the latest productivity pair I’ve been using is the Oso AI earbuds, a pair specifically designed for work to transcribe and summarize calls.
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Oso’s earbuds are poweed by GPT-5 to take note of your meetings, phone calls, or even face to face conversations and record them, transcribe them, provide summaries, and translations through the integrated AI by Laxis’ AI meeting notetaker.
The earbuds themselves are feature 13mm dynamic drivers, a dual beamforming microphone, and support for Bluetooth 5.2. Physically, the plastic case and shiny earbuds don’t exactly scream premium, but they don’t feel low-end, either. The case has something unique though: a touchscreen display.
Tapping the display shows the time and date, and swiping through the screens shows a host of different features and settings. Volume, brightness, the EQ, playback controls, etc. What’s really helpful, though, is the battery information, which displays each bud’s percentage and the case.
When the case is idle or if you open it to put the buds in, an animated face appears to look around, squint at you, or sometimes give you heart eyes if you tap it. My guess is that the brand wanted to personify the earbuds’ as an “AI Assistant” that jumps in to help you when you need it.
The touchscreen on the earbuds case doesn’t exactly cause usability problems, but handling it does result in menu activation, occasionally skipping tracks, or changing a setting just from pulling the case out of your pocket. It’s one of those things that sounds good on paper but in practice isn’t for everyone. Note that you can turn it off in the settings, though.
As far as the features go, the recording capabilities on the earbuds are rather robust. I tried them out in a few different meetings and the transcripts it generated were about as accurate as any other AI transcription feature you’ll find. The summarization feature was also as accurate, and surprisingly fast at generation.
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Recording phone calls is one of the key features here, since this used to be a rather tricky thing to do. Recorded call quality was excellent, and it couldn’t be easier to activate in the app. Another thing to note here is that although the Oso user will here a “Recording start” voice notification, there is only a subtle sound effect the caller will hear at the recording start.
In the Oso app, you’ll find all your recordings in one place under the Conversation tab. Clicking into a recording will pull up the written transcript with the audio playback the bottom. Scrolling through the audio timeline will automatically adjust to that part of the transcript so you can follow along.
This is also where you can fire up the summary feature, and have the app generate a well-formatted overview of the conversation, meeting, or phone call, complete with bullet points and action items that looks very similar to what you’d see with Google Gemini. When it comes to sharing, you can just copy and paste from the app into Slack, email, or text messaging.
These features are great, and are what the majority of users will engage with, but the LaxisChat — which lets you interface with the chatbot to ask questions about the recorded content — is behind a paywall.
In fact, the app is rife with prompts to upgrade your membership to a premium tier, with a progress bar that shows you just how much room you have left for audio storage with the free membership. You get quite a lot of storage for free, though: 300 minutes of monthly transcription and AI summaries, and 1000 minutes of cloud storage for your recordings.
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If you want to interact with several recorded transcripts and interviews, I could see the membership being useful, but keep in mind that a lot of these features can be found in other places, like on a Google Chromebook Plus using Gemini, Apple Intelligence on a MacBook, or an AI-packed Android like the Samsung Z Fold 7.
The usefulness if the Oso earbuds lies in the app’s ability to keep everything in one place, but at $119/year, the premium tier is not exactly cheap. Especially on top of the cost of the earbuds themselves, which run for $249. Again, this is pricey for a product of this caliber. It’s the same price as Apple’s brand-new AirPods Pro 3, a top-tier pair of buds with ANC and many of the same AI integrations.
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While we’re on the topic of ANC, I should mention that the Oso buds claim to have “smart noise cancellation”, which likely refers to treating audio on calls, but don’t have active noise cancellation that will dim out ambient noise. In that sense, they won’t replace high-end earbuds for most folks.
For example, the Oso earbuds didn’t stand a chance on the subway here in New York, my music being completely drowned out by the ambient noise. To be fair, though, that’s not exactly what they’re made for. These are the earbuds you pop in when you have an important meeting, phone call, or lecture, and you want to record every word both in audio and text.
ZDNET’s buying advice
The Oso AI Assistant Earbuds are great for anyone who has a need to record, transcribe, and summarize conversations, lectures, or meetings. The corresponding app houses all of these features in one place, and the summaries it provides are comparable to other leading AI-powered platforms.
The call recording feature is particularly nice, and journalists in particular will love having access to this feature, which does not sit behind the premium tier. For these transcription and summarization features, which are often services associated with memberships, the $249 price of the earbuds is easily justified.
But if you’re looking for a pair of earbuds that have booming bass and ANC, these are not what you want. The Oso earbuds will play your music, but they’re designed to record, summarize, and transcribe dialogue, and they do it well.
