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

Listening to music while your neighbor is chatting? Ordering a latte but your hands are full and you can't pause the podcast? Conversation detection is a feature of some headphones and headphones can be a game changer. Instead of deleting your active noise canceling headphones or pause the sound with your hands, this handy feature recognizes voices, pauses the sound, and turns off noise cancellation.

This fluidity between the cozy comfort of noise canceling and the bustling real world is extremely useful and easy to set up. However, there are a few important things to consider to ensure that your automatic conversation detection is as effective as possible.

Most noise canceling headphones, including those from Bose and many other manufacturers have a mode called Aware, Awareness or Transparency. This amplifies ambient sound, often in the vocal frequency range. Here I'm talking about the detection feature that makes switching to this mode automatic instead of manually selecting it.

You'll usually see this feature on flagship headphones from Apple, Sony, Google, and Samsung. Everyone calls it differently: Apple has Conversation Awareness, Samsung has Voice Detect, Google has Conversation Detection, and Sony has Speak-to-Chat.

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How does this work

Give opportunity

Conversation modes are usually available in the settings of your headphones' companion app. If your phone and headphones are from Apple or Google, go to your phone's settings and access this feature by tapping on the headphones. Always be sure to update the firmware of all your devices. Apple iOS also provides access to Conversation Awareness through the Control Center, which appears when you swipe down from the top of the screen.

Discover

The array of tiny microphones built into your in-ear headphones or call and noise canceling headphones will detect your voice and go into awareness mode. Many headphones have built-in accelerometers for features such as head tracking and on-ear/head detection; they can also be used to track jaw movement to make sure it's you and not someone nearby who's talking.

Samsung has a separate but related siren detection feature that automatically turns on transparency mode when a siren is detected so you can hear what's happening in an emergency. (Some brands do the opposite and turn on ANC when loud sound is detected.)

Automatic sound adjustment

Once activated, awareness modes also either pause or reduce the volume of any sound currently playing. This behavior varies by brand. For example, Apple devices lower the volume of music but pause podcasts. Instead, Samsung mutes all audio, while Sony and Google devices pause all audio. Ideally, you would be able to choose the behavior, but currently this is still rare. Apple is adding Conversation Boost, which uses microphones and accelerometers to boost the voice of the person you're talking to using head tracking.

End chat and resume

Then, either through some technological wizardry or simply sensing when you stop talking (adjustable on some brands, including Sony), the headphones sense that the conversation has ended and return to the previous audio at the same volume and noise-canceling mode. Many models are better than humans at determining the end of a conversation.

Any model with this feature will also allow you to manually turn talk mode on/off via a long button press or similar action.

Fine print

Conversation detection is initiated your voice, not someone else's, so you can ask people to repeat words when you notice them talking to you. This question activates conversation mode. Depending on how your specific model's detection works, you may need to have both earbuds in your ears to work.

Sometimes conversation detection may be unintentionally triggered by coughing, singing along to music, or other random ambient sounds. It may also not work in very noisy environments, such as construction sites and airplanes. Some models allow you to adjust the sensitivity, and we'd like to see this in firmware updates and future releases.

Frequent listeners of podcasts or audiobooks should choose headphones that pause all audio during a call, 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 volume.

As with all functions that use sensors and microphones, conversation detection will affect battery life to some extent, although it is not a major leak.

Final verdict

Conversation detection modes aren't for everyone, especially high-energy people who talk to themselves at full volume, shout at the news, or sing along to their own tunes. If you reflexively take out your headphones to talk to others, you don't need this feature either—unless you want to change that habit.

I'd like to see more customization options in the future, but even the way this feature is implemented in current headphones and in-ear headphones is a great improvement to the smoothness of digital life.