The Here One wireless ear buds are ridiculous

[MUSIC] What up cnet nation? Welcome back to cnet's live coverage of CES 2017. I am Bryan Tang and joining me here is CEO Noah Craft from Doppler Labs. Two thumps up for this guy. He's here to show us some really cool, not even really cool, to me a little bit of a mind-blowing wireless ear buds. We know wireless ear buds are super hot and Noah first of all Thanks so much for coming out and being here, we appreciate it. . Thanks man. I know you're busy man. And let's just jump right into it. We're here to talk about the hear one ear buds, is that the official name of them or what do you guys call them? We don't even call them ear buds. What do you call them? Hear one. Okay see that's why he's here to tell me it's hear one. If anything they're hear buds. Or hearables? You don't like that, see people have been throwing that around right here. It basically piggybacks on wearables, which has a lot of connotations to it as well. The way we look at it, Here One's truly the first computer for the ears. And I know that's a big statement. Yeah let's go, let's do it. But the way we look at this products is, obviously there's a lot of wireless headphones on the On the market. And if you know, we started with this product called Hear Active Listening. The main purpose of Peer Active Listening was to tune you in or tune you out of your world in a way that was right for you. That was showcased last year. Yeah that was a year ago, exactly right. When you showed off the technology. Exactly and the purpose of that was we wanted to give people full dynamic control over how they hear the world. We called it kind of super human hearing. You put that product in. And you could turn the volume up, you could turn the volume down, you can add filters like airplane mode. And it was really kinda a augmented reality now we knew to really make this a product the people could use all the time. Headphone functionality is something people need and so with here one what we did it we said look, we're gonna use the kind of basis of a headphone, wireless headphone as way to get people to adopt this product, if you think at the analog what kinda of the Iphone right? The Iphone is computer. But when Apple launched it, they didnt call it a pocket computer. They called it an iPhone because the core function to begin with was phone calls. But then you had apps, and then you had email. So the way we look at the world is we believe in the future people are going to be wearing tech in their ears a lot more. And, we wanna give people a full feature set of streaming, telephany, but also the secret sauce we add is when you put the product in, you can hear the world totally normal. And that's what you're going to try today because what that allows you to do is still be able to interact with people, have this experience that's dynamic, as well as utilize the headphone telephony and everything else you'd find in a normal headphone. I think what I want to be clear to the audience right now is that I brought Here one on stage. Because I've never tried these. This is really the first time that they're showing them off to outlets to showcase and video format. Yeah. You guys have kinda been a little more secretive. Like, okay, well let some of the writers talk about it. So to me there's a little bit of tech hype built up. And I just wanted to experience for the first time. But also allow you all watching, to really understand what's going on here. Because Quite honestly, this is one of the products that I'm most hyped up for 2017. And so why not bring them to the stage? Everything I've read and heard sounds bonkers. So can you first of all kind of bust them out and [CROSSTALK] Yeah, so gimme a [UNKNOWN] one. I also got a new nickname for him, instead of computer [UNKNOWN]. Yeah. How about a [UNKNOWN]? You can imagine every version of that. [LAUGH] Yeah, I wasn't the first one, I wasn't the first one. We've even, [UNKNOWN]. Okay. [LAUGH] Every Bad branding idea, you can imagine. I think that's a great branding. Your computers. All right, check this out. This is Hear One. So the first thing, this is for your left ear. Okay I'm gonna give people a chance to kinda see these. This is like all wireless ear buds or like the Hear Ones, this is a charging case, correct? Yes. And so basically the way the tech works is the charging case. basically allows you to get multiple charges out of it, but as you can see, the buds are really small and we spent a lot of time with this product -. Can I hold this for a second? Yeah. Making sure we kind of tried to balance three things. One is aesthetics. It's really important to us that this is a product that people wear proudly. Because of that pass through, people are going to be wearing this in social environments, right? We actually launched the last product at Coachella And you can imagine having people put tech in their ears is not the easiest thing as a festival. But that's a whole part of the ethos of what we're doing. We wanna play in spaces where a normal wireless headphone can't, cuz a normal wireless headphone's about isolating you so you can listen to a stream. Now we can do that very well as you'll try, but what we can do that no one else can do is that full augmentation that allows you to connect with the world. Okay. So let's put it in your ears. Let's give it a shot, all right. And to your point, hype is cheap. The product is what matters. [LAUGH] This again, first, I'm a Here One virgin, as they say, okay. I'm a hergin. A hergin I guess. You keep ripping on [LAUGH]. Okay so. Sorry, is this a? Left, you're going in the right. [LAUGH] I put it in the wrong hole, guys. Wow. [LAUGH] My bad. Here we go, all right. Okay, perfect, there we go, got it in. This is for the righty? Yeah, there you go. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. Okay, there we go. No, that's perfect. Okay. So the first thing you'll see is, you have a product in your ears but you can hear me completely normally, like it's your normal ears. So is there any setting that you set all [CROSSTALK] This is our zero, so If you see basically the whole map has the volume knob. And so well actually perfect, this is zero. And so we worked really hard on it. What we're actually doing on is digitally reproducing the audio entering your ears. Really. Your ears are completely blocked and the fact that it sound like your normal ear was not easy to do. [LAUGH] This sounds very normal to me. So that's the whole point. So your base line is Even though you have a product you're just interacting with the world, now this is where it starts getting weird. [LAUGH] Let's get weird. I'm gonna turn up the volume on your world and all of a sudden everything is gonna be very loud. I can hear you, you're really loud. But then I can turn down the volume on your world. Okay he just, it feels like right now the ear buds. It's like an ear plug. Yeah they're plugs right now that I I can't hear anything. And so, what we've done is you have this full volume knob. But what we've started with of course with this product is an excellent headphone. Because to get people to really adopt this, we wanna set the standard for wireless streaming. Okay. So that's the baseline, you gotta get the table stakes right, and then you can build on top of it. Again, the iPhone hasn't made good phone calls, you wouldn't have used it for email App store, et cetera, right? So, what type of music are you into? Give me some hip hop, give me some, or give me a little RiRi, whatever you've got. Dude, I'm gonna give you some old, we're gonna give you some Dizzy Rascal. Okay. It's gonna be, and this will show you how good the bass is. So, the first thing I can do is I can mimic a true wireless headphone, so I'm gonna actually turn down the volume of your world. Okay. Noise canceling, and I'm gonna turn up the music [UNKNOWN] Wait, talk right now. Hey, hows it going? Good. [LAUGH] Yeah. This is good. And so, what we can do is, what we did is we created a head- I can't hear you right now. I know. So actually- So when you're talking- Here's the first thing, tap the side. All right. Tap one tap? Yeah. What just happened? You went into bypass mode, you're now in normal hearing. Okay, so you're first in your own world, listening to music, and then, with one tap, I can now- So, let's say you're sitting at your desk, open office. Or let's say you're at a coffee shop and a young lady walks by that you wanna talk to, I'm looking out for all you nerds out there, all right? No, but the point is, right now we're having a totally normal conversation. Yes. But you have a product in your ear. Yes. Tap again. You're just trying to blow my mind here, aren't you? [BLANK_AUDIO] Girl wasn't talking to me. I'm back to my music. [LAUGH] You got it. Forget you. Forget you, I don't need this. So, the basic premise here. I got my Sinatra in my ear right now. But actually so, to that point, actually I'll show you one more thing with the headphone. We call this layered listening. So, Right? What I should you before is the headphone. Right now you're listening to Due Garlington at like 30%, right? Okay. But you can still hear me totally normally. So now you have a sound track to your life, Yeah. So the point of this is I'm controlling but you when you have this have the mix for yourself. So maybe you want full fidelity of the world with I listen to the score of The Gladiator all the time because it just pumps me up but I do it at 20%. So no one knows I have the score of The Gladiator on at 20% that's just totally pumping me up. Wow okay so for those of you that are watching are you understanding kind of what we're talking about? Does this make sense? I know you can't hear it but I'm able to experience the world around me while also listening to my music and on the fly. Change that like crazy. I'll show you. Now I'm gonna put the commentary for the giants in your ears so you could be sitting here right now totally interacting with me but hooked into the game if that's what you need. It's true mixed reality. I hope I'm interacting with you more than I'm listening to the game. [LAUGH] I hope I'm not that boring right? Or Siri. Siri can just give you an update. But we're still totally talking. It doesn't remove you at all. And that's one of the powers of the ear. Unlike the eyes where it's totally in the way, you can do this kind of stuff subliminally. I'm gonna give you the weather right now. Weather update, but again, you're not removed from me. And you can choose to listen to that. You can choose what volume it's at. You have full control of these layers. These are incredibly cool. Now a question that obviously there was a lot of hype. Around Apple's air pods. What type of physical controls can you play, pause? Because here's the thing, my biggest criticism is you can only set it to prompt you Siri or pause and play. So what level of controls do the Hear One have? So, right now we have several stages of UI. Okay. As you can see a lot of it is app enabled right now. And we added cap touch because we don't want you to have to pull out the phone. Yeah. So right now you can tap touch for bypass. You can tap touch for phone calls and you can double tap for Siri. Okay. But we didn't want people doing all this- you know some other volume swipes, triples, Morse code on your ear. The point is that's awkward. So step one is cap-touch and there's the app. Next is voice. We're really interested in voice commands, right? So this is an audio system, you can imagine a world where a voice pops into your head and says, hey, do you want to go into a restaurant mode? And that's what I'm gonna show you next. Okay. And all you do is either tap or say yes in the system, you never take your phone out And we build this home machine on the backend and eventually we'll even become proactive and curate the world for you. We're jumping way ahead. Let me show you- Cuz this is a compute here. Yeah. Exactly. Remember that. So the bottom line is to your point where you utilize for us. Because it's as much about the social interaction than it is about the tech. Right? You need to have this flow. We're going to bring you deeper into the app. And I know we're gonna go through all this, but again, a big part of [UNKNOWN] that makes it different is all this curatorial stuff. So what I'm gonna show you next is directional hearing. Okay, this is gonna freak me out. So we have directional mic hearing. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just kinda turn your ears left and right. What I'm gonna do is actually Matt over there is gonna talk. And just kinda, Matt, right now start talking. So you can't, can you hear what he's saying? I mean I can hear him a little bit. Like can you make out what he's saying? Well now when I'm really trying yes okay. But not really right? Yeah not really. So I'm gonna turn on front directional mics. Okay. So now turn towards Matt. Jeez this is stupid. [LAUGH] Just turn towards him. And he hasn't changed his mind. [LAUGH] Okay, I turned to the dude and started hearing him louder. [LAUGH] This is disturbingly crazy, badass. This is badass. So wait, he'll whisper to you. We got a question from the audience. Question from the audience? Battery life? Battery life, great one. Great, so it depends how you're using the product. Right, the battery life for streaming is about two and a half hours with two and a half full charges in the case. Now it's a really important point that you were asking about air pods and we'll get into this. This is an episodic product. We're not just your normal wireless headphone. If you want to just have a wireless headphone or wired headphone, right, ear pods. You should go buy that. This is a product that's really meaningful for specific uses, right? And you can use it as a great wireless headphone, don't get me wrong. But this is for the consumer who's in the open office, who needs that tap so they can interact with people. One of the biggest cohorts that comes to us is commuters, right? You might need to hear while you're biking the world. Or when you're on the subway, you might wanna talk to your, or if you're in our airplane mode Our airplane mode takes out the jet engine, but doesn't adulterate human speech. That's crazy. So you can sit on an airplane with a colleague, have a totally normal conversation without the jet engine or you can listen to media and again, just one tap, the flight attendant comes up, hey I want a ginger ale. You tap it in. We're really aiming for these cohorts that need that real-world augmentation. And just to explain to people, this is really a technology that you have to experience. I just wanted to illustrate the best way that I could, being your guinea pig. I'm turning on another filter. No, don't do that. I just put on crowd filter. Can everyone start talking? Actually in the audience, just like blabber. Make noise. Blah blah blah blah blah right okay? Okay they're blah blah blah. So we're talking now. Yeah yeah. And now all of a sudden they're going to go away. No keep talking so [LAUGH]. Okay that's enough I'm freaked out. It's freaking badass. So what he just experience is our crowd filter will tune into the->> [LAUGH] So imagine you're at a restaurant, right. You can tune into the conversation at the restaurant and take out the din of the world around you. Okay, we're gonna wrap this up. But one quick thing before go. Yep. I do wanna do one comparison. Because I think this is important, right. I'm gonna let the crowd hear. We play a little game called CES. Or CE-No and from a fashion standpoint, you know. I'm gonna turn this way, okay. CE-Yes or CE-No? I'm gonna turn my head. What about this side? Yes? Yes. No. Again Again. That's what I thought, that's what I thought. [LAUGH] All right, thank you very much Noah. Really appreciate it. [CROSSTALK] Here ones available in February. February? [CROSSTALK] Pre-order now. How much? If you want it, two ninety nine.>> Two ninety nine. It's available for pre-order now, it will start shipping in February. Im telling mind blowing tech, this is amazing guys. Thank you so much Noah.