Qualcomm has introduced Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, a wearable audio platform built not only for conventional wireless headphones but also for camera-equipped headsets, smart glasses and other hybrid devices. The chip is intended to give AI assistants more environmental context through visual and audio inputs while allowing wearables to connect directly to cloud services.
The platform delivers 0.128 TOPS of AI compute, double the figure of the previous generation, according to Qualcomm. The company also says it has reduced power consumption by 40% and cut the chip’s motherboard footprint by about 30%.
- Low-power Wi-Fi 6E across the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands, allowing a wearable to access cloud services without a phone serving as the required intermediary.
- An Arm Cortex-M55 processor clocked at 300MHz, an eNPU 6 accelerator and multiple DSPs.
- Support for Bluetooth 7.0 and Bluetooth 6.0, with stated consumption of roughly 3–4mAh.
- Audio features including aptX Lossless, XPAN, fifth-generation Qualcomm ANC, cVc call-noise reduction and multi-microphone configurations.
Qualcomm positions integrated cameras as a way to supply an AI assistant with visual information, potentially enabling real-time translation, contextual assistance, personalized hearing features and interactions that combine image, audio and AI. Wi-Fi connectivity could also reduce latency for cloud-backed functions and make these devices less dependent on a companion smartphone.
Qualcomm says several companies are already developing products based on Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2:
- Bose
- HP
- Cleer
No specific products, launch dates or pricing have been detailed, leaving the first commercial implementations of Qualcomm’s camera-aware audio platform to be confirmed by its partners.
