The modern world is funny. I have a hearing impairment, tinnitus, and use both AirPods and less visible hearing aids to hear people better. I only wear the AirPods around people who know me well enough to know that I am wearing them so that I can better hear them. I don’t want strangers to think I don’t want to hear them or that I am being rude. When I am out among strangers, I wear the less visible hearing aids.
But a funny consequence is that because my modern, less visible, hearing aids are connected to my phone, I am often listening to podcasts or news and nobody can tell. So sometimes a stranger will say something and I have to pause the audio and ask them to repeat themselves.
I am wondering what social norms will be like once everyone has less visible electronics in their ears.
Wouldn't it be cool if this situation could be detected and when you hit pause it would actually repeat them for you?
So you want your magical EarPods to be always listening and recording everything from the past, say 5 seconds?
It would probably be the phone, but yes
Already is, in some sense, for 'hey siri'.
A brief ring buffer is a fairly privacy-respecting implementation, as opposed to long-term capture and storage.
Demonstrating that such a capability is in fact a brief ring buffer to the average Joe or Josephina on the street might prove more challenging, and numerous similar technologies have rapidly acquired a highly pejorative taint, e.g., "glassholes".
Ever thought about wrapping your AirPods to be skin-colored? I wonder if that would be more inviting for strangers than the stereotypical white color.
No, it never occurred to me. This has prompted a fun discussion with my wife. I suggested I could grow some stem cells into a skin that would match the color of my ears. She suggests that I should not have these ideas.
You could also tint your ears white, I suppose ... ;-)