Open-Ear Audio Meets The AI Revolution
If you reside within the United Kingdom, you’ll know it’s been properly hot over the past few months. And if you live anywhere else, talk to a Brit for a couple of seconds and they’ll be sure to tell you. Just when you think you’ve survived the last heatwave – portable fan in hand and shadiest of spots secured – there’s bound to be another scorcher just around the corner.
Spare some particular sympathy for those of us who like to cruise through life whilst perpetually listening to music, making use of our favourite pair of headphones or the best wireless earbuds. You see, sweat loves to accumulate when you have the latest Sony WH-1000XM6’s wrapped snugly around your head, or the likes of the final VR3000 earbuds nestled firmly in your canals. The point is thus: heat + headphones = not comfortable at all!
Luckily, that’s where a third category comes into full force – that of the open-ears. Popular especially with the athletically-minded, the plethora of open-ear earbuds on the market can be life-savers on the most perspirant of days. The latest open-ear to take to the shelves? Well, that’d be the viaim OpenNote. And the viaim OpenNote is a proper corker of a product!
A Premium First Impression
First things first, the user experience with the OpenNotes has been an absolute dream. From the moment you open the sleek white box these earbuds come in, you can immediately tell that the folks over at viaim prioritise function over form.
That’s not to say you won’t find any sleekness here. The case you’ll be carrying around when rolling with the OpenNotes is of a real premium quality. sporting a leather-looking base surrounded by a high-quality metal finish. I particularly appreciate the decision to go with a thin, long rounded pill shape to proceedings, almost like a mini glasses case. You’ll always be able to easily retrieve the case from the depths of any pocket, without you being inconvenienced by its shape.
Where The OpenNote Really Comes Into Its Own
And the buds themselves? Well, any looped open-ear earbud has to tow the line between making you look like a professional runner or a pretentious businessman, and luckily the OpenNote falls moreso into the former camp. As is the case in this category of buds, the OpenNote buds sit hovering over your ear canal, but never go anywhere near the inside of them. This allows for you to listen to your sick beats, true crime podcast, or favourite Xbox Game Pass game whilst also being able to listen in to the world around you.
Critically, and you probably knew this already, noise-cancelling earbuds these are not. Open-ears exist primarily to keep you in tune with the real world whilst allowing you to keep your listening entertainment flowing. You’ll easily be able to hear your plane passenger snoring, the tapping of laptops in the cafe or, more importantly, traffic running on the road as you are jogging by, with more than enough confidence that you won’t be able to drown out anything you want to (or need to) keep an ear out for. The viaim OpenNotes do not come with any ability to filter out noise but that’s 1) not the point, and 2) pretty much impossible given their ‘open-ear’ nature.
It’s for this reason then, if it’s a set of earbuds that you intend to use primarily for gaming, the OpenNotes are not the one for you. Whether it’s immersion into the latest narrative adventure, full attention given towards the most intense of shooters, or for whenever you want to get fully enthralled into your games without listening to the outside world, any open-ear earbuds are obviously not the go-to. The latency is also not the best when streaming games via Xbox Cloud Gaming, although one can never truly tell if that’s the fault of the earbuds, or Microsoft’s eternally shoddy streaming…
Comfortable Listening Without The Sweat
However, where the OpenNotes do thrive, going back to my Anglo-centric argument introduced at the top of this piece, is that you’ll be able to go throughout your day (hot or not) without feeling like your earbuds are getting super-sweaty and adding to any discomfort. If you are at some point not playing anything through them, I’d go as far as to say you don’t really recognise that they are there at all, and that’s a job well done in my book!
Light On Bass, But Clear Enough
The actual listening experience offered by the OneNotes is also light and breezy. You will certainly not be blown away with how loud you can go with these (at maximum volume, the OpenNotes reach what most earbuds would get to at around 75% capacity), but in the same breath it would be a stretch to say you’ll be particularly disappointed. Similarly, these guys aren’t particularly bassy, instead prioritising clarity over tones. Alas, volume and bass is never something you’ll be looking for in abundance if you still want to keep some of the outside world from leaking in.
The AI Features Are A Different Story
Of course, no technology product worth even an ounce of consideration would go without some kind of in-built AI-powered features nowadays, but I hasten to say any have gone as far as the folks over at viaim. Specifically, where the OneNotes are positioned is firmly in the realm of note-taking: wherever you go, whatever you do, you will always have the ability to hold down on the touchpad of either bud and start a voice note. Once you finish your stream of consciousness, hop over to the free viaim app, and you’ll be able to playback your voice notes, as well as make use of all manner of AI-powered features to understand what you were saying. The viaim app can transcribe your voice into text, use AI to put together a decently coherent list of main talking points, organise a to-do list (useful for shopping lists perhaps), and even clip out background noise and periods of silence to make your notes optimised for re-listening.
Vitana And The AI Assistant
Vitana – viaim’s very own AI agent – can also answer questions based on your voice notes, making use of Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude (and their Pro versions, if you upgrade your viaim experience) to help you make sense of your own thoughts.
It’s here where things can get a little difficult to appraise. Firstly, whatever your thoughts on the ominous invasion of AI into every facet of our lives may be, one struggles to see where this USP of the viaim OpenNotes finds a role. Whilst the voice notes are played back in pretty splendid quality, even if you are near a busy road, for example (a huge positive for the OpenNotes which extends to some truly world-class voice call quality for the receiver), what’s to say you can’t use any other earbuds to record voice notes, and chuck them into your AI agent of choice? It’s an issue that has befallen many smaller tech companies (the Humane AI pin, the Rabbit R1, I could go on…) – why would I store all of my thoughts and questions on your app, when I can have them all stored on the Gemini app which is endlessly more easy to use, and multi-media?
Unfortunately, when your earbuds have the option to hold down on the right earbud to start a voice note that goes to the viaim app, or hold down on the left to call up Gemini and start a voice note from Google’s AI behemoth, I know which one I’m going to pick 100% of the time.
The OpenNote Makes Sense
Fortunately, you can pretty much choose to ignore the AI features and use the viaim OpenNotes as one of admittedly the best open-ear earbuds money can buy. Whilst the viaim OpenNotes have very few touch controls, and one of them is forced to be the control to start/stop AI recording, voice controls can be enabled and are incredibly reliable. And you’ll want to utilise voice controls over touch, as the active area for touch is very, very small. Despite all the on-board AI packaged in, you’ll also get a more than serviceable battery life of 19 hours on a single charge, and up to 53 hours when you factor in the charge stored in the case.
The viaim OpenNotes are truly a product of their generation. The AI bubble is going one of two ways: it’ll either burst and we’ll all be left confused about what a strange few years that was, or it’ll keep gathering momentum with the likes of OpenAI and Google leading the charge. One thing is for certain – there’s no room in the Artificial Inn for viaim, I’m sorry to say.
But, use the viaim OpenNotes as open-ear earbuds – whether you are doing exercise, want to hear conversations around you, or for comfort – and you’ll have a whale of a time. These buds probably are worth the $170 price tag if you forgo all of the AI-ness, so if you are comfortable with using a pretty limited app interface instead of the likes of ChatGPT, the deal gets sweeter.
You can pick up your own pair of the viaim OpenNote direct on their website. Huge thanks go out to viaim for providing us a set of their OpenNotes for review.
