Voice AI startup Subtle is stepping out of the background and into your ears.
The company, known for building voice isolation models that help computers pick out speech in noisy places, has announced its first hardware: a pair of wireless "voice buds" designed to make you sound clear on calls and get more accurate transcriptions for voice notes.
Subtle revealed the earbuds ahead of CES in Las Vegas and plans to ship them in the U.S. in the coming months. The buds are priced at $199 and include a one-year subscription to Subtle’s iOS and Mac app.
Unlike generic wireless earbuds, Subtle is selling these as a full voice interface bundle. With the app, you can take voice notes, dictate text and chat with an AI assistant without touching the keyboard. The company says a custom chip inside the buds can wake a locked iPhone so you can start talking hands-free.
Subtle is also going after a growing wave of AI-powered dictation tools like Wispr Flow, Willow, Monolouge and Superwhisper. Its pitch: because the buds are tuned for speech isolation, you can dictate into any app — email, docs, messages — while blocking out background noise.
The company claims the combination of its earbuds and models delivers five times fewer transcription errors than using AirPods Pro 3 together with OpenAI’s transcription model. TechCrunch saw a demo where the buds captured clean audio in a noisy environment and still produced readable text. In another test, Subtle’s co-founder and CEO Tyler Chen whispered a voice note; the system still turned it into text.
"We are seeing that there is a huge move towards voice as a new interface that a lot of folks are adopting. You can do much more with voice in a natural way than with a keyboard," Chen told TechCrunch. "However, we saw that voice is rarely an interface people use when others are around. So that using our noise isolation model, we will give consumers a way to experience a voice interface in the form of our earbuds."
The launch lands in the middle of a broader hardware scramble around voice-first computing. Last year, companies like Sandbar and Pebble teased smart rings aimed at quick note-taking. Chen’s bet is that pairing earbuds with Subtle’s app can roll dictation, AI chat and voice notes into a single system instead of asking users to juggle multiple gadgets and services.
On the basics, Subtle’s earbuds will ship in black and white colorways. You can pre-order them now through the company’s website, with U.S. deliveries expected within a few months. The company hasn’t shared international plans yet.
Subtle has raised $6 million to date and has already been working behind the scenes with consumer electronics brands including Qualcomm and Nothing to deploy its noise isolation models. The earbuds are its first attempt to put that tech directly in consumers’ ears rather than hiding inside someone else’s product.
If Subtle can really make your phone understand you — even when you’re whispering on a busy street — its buds could be one of the more interesting AI gadgets to watch at CES this year.
