If you own a pair of AirPods Pro, you’d know that Apple’s advanced TWS earphones offer various nifty features, including a transparency mode and an active noise cancellation mode. While the latter is useful when you want an immersive listening experience, it can block out environmental noises (say a colleague or family member calling your name) that you might want to hear. The company currently offers a transparency mode that lets you hear what’s going on around you, but you need to enable it manually. However, that could change in the future. Apple is now working on a way to automatically activate transparency mode on the AirPods Pro.
To allow users to hear necessary surrounding noises, Apple has filed a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that describes a system to automatically interrupt noise cancellation mode using a codeword or a trigger word on AirPods Pro. The patent was filed by the company back in July 2021 and was recently published by the USPTO.
However, to avoid false positives and other issues, Apple suggests that the AirPods Pro would be able to process the volume information and calculate the “time-of-arrival difference” when a person calls the user or uses a trigger word. In fact, the company suggests that if a user listens to music by connecting the earphones to their iPhone, the latter will also be able to process the information and auto-interrupt the noise cancellation mode.
The system would rely on certain codewords like the name of the user. However, users will be able to set their desired words that could trigger the system to disable noise cancellation and activate the transparency mode on future AirPods Pro.
