Google’s second-generation Assistant headphones went on sale in nine countries today as part of the international launch. Next month you’ll see more colors available, as well as a feature drop level update for Pixel Buds that adds new features and fixes audio clipping.
Excluding an immediate first-day update, there have been two firmware versions since Pixel Buds launched. The former did not introduce any noticeable changes, while the latter addressed the audio hiss. In addition to the patches, Google plans to introduce “new useful features over time” for its Assistant headsets that are analogous to Pixel Drops phone features.
That first major update is slated for “late August,” though Google’s head of wearable devices Sandeep Waraich did not specify what functionality will be featured in an interview with Forbes:
“Our next release will have a combination of new features … and then we will also have performance improvements in terms of greater product stability.”
We previously saw work on “attention alerts” that could detect smoke, barking and crying alarms, while Google previously said that the headphones will appear in the Find My Device app.
Meanwhile, the company pledged last month to implement the following Pixel Buds fixes:
- Decrease instances of phone call outages
- Improve automatic recovery when one or both headphones lose connection
- Improve media playback stability for phones that have software audio encoding
Waraich points out the main problem with audio cutbacks to the nature of Bluetooth and the physical design of truly wireless headphones (TWE) that limit antenna size. That said, it acknowledges “corner cases” and that Google plans to address them:
“They could be corner cases where it’s just that certain things would cause the outbreaks to crash. [Those are] very few, perhaps once every 10,000 cases or once every 100,000 cases. But when it starts mounting, we want to make sure that we are fixing all the problems where memory overflow occurs or any of the conditions stated, and then the system might crash.
However, Google, citing comments and analysis, believes that the “vast majority” of Pixel Buds owners do not face any problems. The company sent out a survey last month that asked customers to identify problems.
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