Microsoft Surface Earbuds first listen: live transcribe your life

Microsoft is getting into the truly wireless earbud game. The company just announced the new $249 Surface Earbuds, which are the second product in its portfolio of headphones after last year’s Surface Headphones. The Earbuds are similar to the many other wireless earbuds that are available already, but Microsoft has included some productivity-specific features with them that you won’t find anywhere else. They’ll be available later this year.

I had a chance to demo the new Earbuds after Microsoft’s presentation today, and while the environment wasn’t great for evaluating the sound quality of the headphones, I did get to demo a few of their unique features.

The Earbuds are very similar feature-wise to other wireless earbuds. They have eight hours of battery life with a charging case that provides up to 24 hours of use, and they rest inside your ear without blocking your ear canal. That means they don’t block outside sound all that well, and Microsoft says that’s by design. They are more comfortable than most earbuds, however, and they managed to stay in my ears once I got the right size tips on them.

Outside things are a little different, as the Earbuds have a large, dish-looking apparatus on them that’s used for touch interactions. You can tap on the flat pad to play or pause music, launch apps like Spotify, or adjust the volume and skip tracks. You can also summon Cortana via a long press on the pad, but there isn’t an always-listening feature like there is for Alexa or Siri on Amazon and Apple’s earbuds.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Earbuds is their ability to live transcribe what you are saying while presenting a PowerPoint on a connected computer. I was able to see the words I just spoke light up on the screen just below the slide, even though the noise levels in the testing room (as you’ll hear in the video) are far from ideal.

Microsoft is going to have to rely on those productivity features to really justify the Earbuds’ cost, however: at $250, they are considerably more expensive than the competition. And since they don’t have things like active noise cancellation, they are missing features that are found on Amazon’s far less expensive Alexa Buds.

We’ll have plenty more to say about the Surface Earbuds once we are able to test them for review and truly evaluate their audio performance. Needless to say, between Amazon and Microsoft rapidly entering this space, it’s no longer just an AirPods world.