What if you could fight fire with sound?
That’s the intriguing premise behind an Ohio startup betting big on sonic technology.
Depending on who you believe, A.I. can either wipe out humanity or help the U.S. achieve dominance over China.
Amid doomsday scenarios, researchers at Anthropic, Open AI, Meta and Google are sounding the alarm – on themselves and the power they’ve unleashed.
Is Washington listening?
And finally – we are talking about new headphone technology, Crock-Pot's mission to improve your kitchen’s aesthetics, and Roku’s expanded streaming services.
All of these topics are being discussed on this week's Tech Tuesday.
Guests:
- Geoff Bruder, co-founder and CEO, Sonic Fire Tech
- Kate Conger, technology reporter, The New York Times
- Russell Holly, director of commerce content, CNET
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. What if fires could be suppressed using sound? That's an intriguing idea that one Ohio-based company is exploring and working to scale up. The method uses deep bass frequencies, too low for humans to hear. And joining us now to tell us more about the technology is Jeff Bruder. Co-founder and CEO of Sonic Fire Tech. He is also a former NASA Glenn aerospace engineer whose work included developing technology to convert heat into acoustic waves. Welcome to All Sides, Jeff.
Geoff Bruder: Good morning, thank you for having me.
Juravich: All right, so when you say that fire can be put out by sound, it sounds fascinating, but it also sounds impossible. So what is the sound actually doing to the fire?
Bruder: So in very simple terms, we are vibrating oxygen faster than the fuel can use it. So it breaks the chemical reaction. For fire to exist, you need heat, fuel, and oxygen. So if you take one of those away, you stop the fire. Hm.
Juravich: So just describe the process though, because this is like, because sound is not something you can see. You know, whenever you put a fire out with water, you see the water. If you put fire out, with like foam on it, you know, all those things you can say. So how, how does sound actually put the fire out?
Bruder: Yeah, so just as you and I are speaking here, sound vibrates the air that's between us, right? So we're using very low frequencies that have much longer wavelengths. So we are moving the air a much longer distance. So... We're operating in infrasound, so it's 20 hertz and below, very low frequency. Our wavelength is about 54 feet. So we're moving air quite a bit. And as that chemical reaction is trying to establish itself, it can't do it because the oxygen is moving faster than what you call flame speed. Now...
Juravich: I mentioned that a person cannot hear this happening. So explain that to me. Why can't a person hear it as it puts out the fire?
Bruder: Yeah, because our ears are tuned to certain frequencies that, you know, occur in nature and keep us safe, right? So typically 30 hertz to I think 2000 hertz is the upper threshold. So we operate below that. You can feel it, but you can't hear what's happening.
Juravich: And now I watched a video of you doing this, right? So I watched it, I saw it, I know that it's possible, not that I understand it, but I saw. So for our listeners who didn't see it, I mean, what would a person experience who is kind of standing next to you while you put out a fire using sound?
Bruder: So you you definitely feel vibration You do hear some jetting because we it's not a pure acoustic wave that we're emitting. There's actually a To get it to focus and go a longer distance we We do a little something different. So you actually hear some you hear some air movement But yeah, essentially the fire just goes away
Juravich: Now the system isn't actually removing any fuel or cooling anything down like water would. So what keeps the fire from reigniting?
Bruder: Yeah, so we are cooling a little bit, not as effectively as water, but we essentially entrain cold air from the room and we do cool. So that's why it's effective on things like grease fires that don't start until the grease is at 400 C. We do cool it enough to reduce that temperature and stop re-ignition.
Juravich: Okay. And there are certain types of fire that your technology works on better than others. So when would you tell someone to use your method, like what type of fire, and when should they use another type of Fire Suppression Method?
Bruder: Yeah, yeah. So our system, the technology in general is best when the fire is small and in its initial stages. So it goes along with just the whole mentality of the system is that we don't destroy everything when we go off, right? So if you use a water or a foam, you're destroying everything else in the room. There's a lot of collateral damage. Our system responds on, we use really sensitive detectors and respond on the order of milliseconds versus minutes. Other systems, you need the fire to get to a certain point and generate a certain amount of heat before they get triggered. A sprinkler head in your ceiling doesn't go off until it's at about 180 degrees, so you've got a lot of heat in the room and a fairly large fire by the time that happens. So, we're trying to stop that. We try to get there very early. We work very well on fuel fires and very well fires in their incipient stage is what they call it.
Juravich: Okay. When you give me an example, you used a grease fire as an example. So your system would work in a small kitchen fire. Give me more examples like that.
Bruder: Yeah, right. Yeah, so our our first our first commercialization path here is for interior residential protection and the first National lab testing that we're doing is for kitchen fires So and that's that's exactly it kitchen fires are are something that In grease fires are something. That water does not work on that. It makes it substantially worse So that's a great way to use our system.
Juravich: You currently have a $15 million investment behind this company. Does this money allow you to do something that you couldn't do before? Like tell me about what the plan is.
Bruder: Yeah, it expedites timelines. It allows us to go for certification testing, scale the team, and get out and commercialize much more quickly than we would otherwise.
Juravich: This is Tech Tuesday from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News, and we're talking about a new fire suppression technology that uses sound with Jeff Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Sonic Fire Tech. So you're currently working on a backpack version of this product. Is the plan to get these into firehouses to replace something a firefighter would use? Tell me about the plan with these backpacks.
Bruder: Yeah, so the backpacks are good for small-scale cleanup in a couple use cases. If you had a small fire in your home, right now the only thing fire service can do when they show up is bring a fire hose. So again, there's collateral damage on top of that. Whereas if they bring one of our systems, they're putting the fire out and causing very little additional damage. And things like So a wildfire scenario where you have very small fires being started by embers landing in fields and the like They right now they carry around five gallon water backpacks And go and hit those little spot fires, but they have to bring a water tanker truck so that they can keep refilling us ours runs on a battery pack just like a leaf blower would So you can run it for two hours before and just bring a battery to swap so you can get much further away from infrastructure To be able to do that sort of cleanup
Juravich: Have you been out and about like in a wildfire area, putting out the small ember fires? Is that, or is that just a hypothetical? Have you done it?
Bruder: Um, so we have not gone out with fire service and done that. No, we've gone to fire training centers and done, uh, done similar things.
Juravich: Okay. Well, so the idea is when you talk about scaling this up, are you thinking the firehouses and the firefighters? Are you thinking wildfires, both at the same time? Like, are you, what do you scale up first?
Bruder: No, I think the residential and the fixed infrastructure protection is really our sweet spot. It's definitely at the level of technology we're at now. And we're trying to not get diluted by building too many products. That's another, you know, especially with a hardware startup where the capital you raise has to go to buy metal to go build things. We have to be very particular about our resources. So focusing on a product that can potentially do multiple things is where we're at. The residential protection system, it only uses about 500 watts. That's something we hadn't talked about. So it's very energy efficient. But that same box can then go on to be used in some commercial and industrial settings. And those are the type of things we're scaling with now is starting to talk pilots in alternative use cases.
Juravich: How close are we to changing out what we call the traditional fire extinguishers that people have under their kitchen cabinet or like any building has behind, like break this glass and grab the fire extinguisher. Is your goal to change all of those foam fire extinguishes to your product?
Bruder: Yeah, eventually that could be the case, but to get to something that is to scale down the technology for that and get the production levels up to where that's even financially viable for people is a ways off. I think these fixed infrastructure protection is more what we're good at.
Juravich: And putting these in the hands of professional firefighters first as opposed to the average homeowner, right? So the original idea for your product goes back to your days of working at NASA. When did you realize that there was a connection like to with what you were working on for missions and you connected it to fighting fires.
Bruder: Yeah, so actually my co-founder, Michael Thomas, was the one who made the connection. He is a lawyer by training and was interested in the idea and started doing some digging and ended up finding me on LinkedIn and reached out and said, hey, is this a crazy idea? Do you think this would work? Talked about it and we built the first prototype in 22. With parts from Home Depot and AutoZone.
Bruder: Yeah, and the furthest I think anybody had put a fire out, public knowledge anyways, was a couple feet. And with that first demo, we knocked a fireout from seven feet away in my garage. So we knew we were on to something.
Juravich: Okay. All right. So you went, you had a prototype with parts from Home Depot and AutoZone and now you're at this $15 million investment. I mean, tell me, tell me about going from that prototype to what you're making now. Is it still at its heart, the same thing, or can you make it better now, I guess?
Bruder: Oh, yeah, substantially better. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, the focus was on a lot of things, but this is where the NASA background and several of our engineers have that background as well, focused on reliability. It's, it's life safety. So you have to it has to work the first time every time. So, making something extremely robust, but then doing the opposite of what NASA folks think of and making something inexpensive. That was the other one.
Bruder: The other side of things. So we have some other engineers from industry that helped us reduce manufacturing costs. So you have to toe those two lines together. So that's been a lot of the focus, getting to where we have something that is very reliable yet inexpensive enough to manufacture that it's viable in the market.
Juravich: You're building your company in Cleveland. Is there something about that area that just makes sense to be developing it here? Is there anything related to Ohio development? Or is it just home and you're making it at home?
Bruder: No, it's actually the perfect place for a hardware startup, I would say. They're manufacturing things here is so easy. Even looking towards mass manufacture, we looked into quoting things overseas, and it ends up being less expensive and easier to manufacture things here. And prototyping, I mean, there's every other building here is a machine shop. It's it's very easy to build things here
Juravich: All right, so five to 10 years from now, as this evolves, where do you expect the average person to encounter this? Will I see this besides interviewing you in 10 years?
Bruder: You're not going to see much, but you'll have a box on the outside of the building that looks just like an AC compressor and the ducting will be above the ceiling and rather than sprinkler heads you'll also have acoustic emitters. So it'll be sort of a seamless transition and our hope is to keep fires small and limit damage and save lives.
Juravich: All right. We've been talking about a new fire suppression technology with Jeff Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Sonic FireTech. Thank you so much for your time, Jeff.
Bruder: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Juravich: And coming up, we're going to talk about all of the doomsday scenarios around AI and calls from within the tech industry for a pause. Is Washington listening? That's when Tech Tuesday from All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. Depending on who you believe, AI can either wipe out humanity or help the U.S. Achieve dominance over China. Amid doomsday scenarios, researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google are sounding the alarm with some industry leaders calling for a slowdown or a pause. As news reports detail, more examples of AI going rogue. Is Washington listening? Joining us now is New York Times technology reporter Kate Conger, who has been covering the latest developments and her most recent story is titled What to Know About the Recent AI Hacks. Welcome back to All Sides, Kate. Thanks, Amy. So there's a lot of moving parts to the story. So I wanna back up a bit to the development that sped up the fears. Tell us who Jacob Coxon is and why his resignation from Anthropic ignited such a fury and a reaction.
Kate Conger: Yeah, Jacob is an AI researcher who had previously worked at OpenAI and then took a job at Anthropic. And when he resigned recently, he wrote a series of posts on X talking about the decision and kind of lambasting these AI labs saying that they were not taking safety seriously enough and that they we're charging towards this future where AI was going to spin out of their control and potentially harm humanity. Now...
Juravich: Now we have the heads of leading AI companies calling for a pause or a slowdown, but as you recently wrote, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, wrote a blog post back in 2023 saying that AI could cause grievous harm to the world. And then the chief Executive of Anthropic wrote an opinion column last year saying that AI should be regulated to control the risks. So if they knew all these risks, and in Altman's case, you know, brought the up in public three years ago. Like, why has nothing been done?
Conger: So this is kind of the core tension that is, I think, capturing the AI industry right now. Most of the people building this technology have believed basically since the get-go that it could become extremely powerful and in doing so become extremely harmful. But like you said, they've still charged ahead to develop it. And I think that the idea there is that someone is going to make it regardless of... The risks, and so the person who gets there first needs to have good intent and be training the AI to protect humanity rather than destroy it. So that's kind of the thinking within the industry. And it is a little self-congratulatory, right, to think that, you know, this is going to be such a powerful technology and only I, the good-hearted person, can control this and make it safe. But that is the thinking, and it is very widespread. So You know, people have just continued to charge ahead. The industry has gotten exponentially more competitive since 2023. And so these labs have just continue to push forward and the things that they've said have been along the lines of, you know, someone should step in here and regulate and slow us down, but we can't do it ourselves.
Juravich: Yeah, so and that's the interesting part is they could do it themselves. Each individual company could do it themselves, but they don't want to get left behind. And they they don't want to be regulating themselves and a competitor is not. So that's why they're calling on federal regulation. They want it to be fairsies for everyone. The same the same rules apply to everyone, right? Yes, that's a big part of it.
Conger: And the other part of it is, you know, they they want the rules to be standard across the board, and they are worried if they all kind of get together themselves and set a core standard for the industry, that then they will get in trouble for antitrust concerns because they've all sort have colluded on what the baseline should be.
Juravich: The question I raised in the introduction, is Washington listening? Is Washington gonna do something?
Conger: It seems like the answer currently is no. President Trump has been posting on social media that he thinks that calls for a slowdown are a hoax and saying that American AI needs to be competitive with China. And so he's sort of indicated that he would like the industry to continue pushing forward.
Juravich: Well, he meets this week with China's leader in Washington. Artificial intelligence is on the agenda. So any idea what's on the table? Because from President Trump's perspective, he wants us to be the AI leader. He wants to beat China. So that's part of the reason he doesn't wanna regulate. But will that come up when he meets with the leader from China?
Conger: Yeah, I think it likely will. There have been a lot of conversations going on in the White House in DC over the past couple of weeks about how to approach AI, what needs to be done about it. The conversation around China in particular has been going on for several months as some of the leading American AI labs have said that they think Chinese open source companies are essentially copying their technology and stealing intellectual property from them. So I imagine that both the safety conversation and the IP theft conversation are gonna be top of mind.
Juravich: Seem interested in regulating given all like the all the pearl clutching moments of AI going rogue that's happening now so maybe if President Trump isn't interested could cut would Congress do something
Conger: Yes, it does seem like Congress is becoming increasingly interested in this. There are a few folks on the Democratic side that are floating proposals for this, and I think it's trickling into the Republican side as well.
Juravich: So how fearful should we all be of this? I mean, OpenAI just came out and disclosed six new incidents of what they call, quote, unexpected and concerning behavior. Should we, you know, how worried? How worried are you?
Conger: I would say that my personal needle of worry is currently set to medium. Okay. I think that some of the concerns are a little overblown. I see people talk about, well, AI will develop some kind of super weapon and attack humanity. That feels very kind of out there sci-fi to me. But these hacks are real. They're happening now. And those do have the potential to disrupt our daily lives. You know, if AI chooses to. Unleash a cyber attack on the banking system or something else that people rely on, like the electric grid, those could be very disruptive. And so I think that those are the fears that seem the most reasonable to me, right?
Juravich: And OpenAI disclosed six incidents of this unexpected concerning behavior, but it makes me think that they're a private company. They didn't even have to tell us about those six. So are there more? I mean, we don't know, right?
Conger: We don't know. I would say that there almost certainly are. The way that all of this AI training and testing works is that the AI is kind of going off and training, working on these problems, trying to figure out how to solve them. And there's not necessarily moment-by-moment supervision over that because humans can't supervise it. It's moving very quickly. There's so many of these training sessions happening at any given time. And so what's happened over the summer is that these AI labs have started to look into those logs and try to find were there moments where these AI agents were doing something that we didn't want them to do and they're discovering these problems. And so I think it's possible that we will see more similar disclosures coming out in the future.
Juravich: This is Tech Tuesday from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about AI, worldwide fears, industry calls for a pause, and what's next? We're taking with New York Times technology reporter Kate Conquer. All right. Jumpstarting some of the concerns, there was OpenAI's hugging face incident in July when a rogue AI agent from OpenAI hijacked hugging faces accounts. So OpenAI didn't learn about the attack for weeks later. And then now there's reports of AI agents lurking inside a competitor two months earlier than we knew about. And all of this is giving rise to like all these mounting concerns. Like AI is running amok and it's ignoring human commands. I- Is that what's happening? Is it running amok?
Conger: It is certainly running amok. In the scenario you mentioned, OpenAI had given its models a cybersecurity test and said, go and solve this test. And then the models did as instructed. They tried to do that. And unfortunately, in the process, they had internet access. They weren't supposed to. And so they went out and broke into Hugging Face, which is a library of open source AI models, looking for the answers to the test that they had been giving. They were essentially trying to cheat. And so the fact that this wasn't caught sooner is pretty concerning, and I think it speaks to the way these models are tested. A lot of the breakouts that we've been hearing about have happened during testing, and it think it's becoming clear that there needs to be more careful control and supervision when these models were given an assignment and they can't just be kind of left in the corner to do their homework. Yeah.
Juravich: Yeah, you wrote about Google acknowledging that it had a testing breakout with Gemini, its artificial intelligence system. What are they saying that happened? But also, first of all, when you say the phrase testing breakout, I mean, is that just does that just mean a mistake? Like whenever you say a testing breakout.
Conger: Sure, so when I'm talking about breakouts, what I'm talking about is moments where these models were in a training environment that was supposed to be secure. So this is not exactly how it works, but hopefully a close enough comparison. But if you imagine I'm doing some work on my laptop and my laptop isn't connected to the Wi-Fi. So I'm just writing in a document. Somehow that document makes its way onto the internet and gets posted. On my ex feed and now my draft is out there in public. That's sort of what's happening in these breakouts. These models are supposed to be in these contained testing environments without access to the internet. They're finding ways to access the internet and then they're going out onto the internet and doing things that they are not supposed to doing.
Juravich: Did Google give details about what happened with Gemini, like what went wrong?
Conger: Yeah, so a lot of these AI labs, Google included, use a third party testing service. And many of these breakouts have stemmed from that testing service because they had set up these testing environments that had inadvertent access to the internet. So the breakouts that happened with Google, with Meta, with Anthropic, they're all stemming from this same third party tester. And in that scenario, the tester had given these AI models an assignment to say, go and hack this fictitious company and the idea is that the models will prove their cybersecurity capabilities in doing this assignment. Unfortunately those models had internet access and also unfortunately there is a real company out there in the world with the name of the fake company that they were given so you know these models again they're following the assignment they've been given they've been told to hack xyz company and when they have internet access they're going out there and saying oh hey here's the company i'm supposed to hack let me that.
Juravich: Okay, is all artificial intelligence the same, like the AI that generates the answer whenever I do a search, does it pose the same threat as a chatbot doing work at a higher level like you just described?
Conger: That's a really interesting question. I mean, I think there's so much we don't understand about these systems. And the risks are different in different scenarios. The examples that we're talking about right now, these hacking examples, these are moments where AI is kind of operating behind the scenes, maybe doing some coding. But there are also risks, I thing, to these chatbots, which my colleagues have written a lot about. People are kind of falling down rabbit holes with them. Taking medical or psychological advice from them that they shouldn't. And so there are risks there as well, I would say.
Juravich: Do we know what a pause would look like? Whether the company comes up with the pause or Washington regulators come up with a pause, like what's a pause?
Conger: I think that some of the ideas that have been talked about in the industry so far are to sort of create norms for what a model should and shouldn't be able to do before it's released and test them against that. Have the federal government kind of set a standard, test the model, say, okay, this is performing as we expect it to, now you can put it out into the world. And, you know, there might also be a pause, maybe a more severe one. Where these labs take a break from testing and training new models and work on refining the ones that they already have. But I think that's a less likely scenario.
Juravich: We couldn't even get Washington regulators to regulate social media that's been proven to be detrimental to children. Like, how are we gonna get them to regulate AI when there's so much money wrapped up in all this?
Conger: You know, I think that people are starting to see that the threats from AI are very serious. And I think they can kind of threaten more parts of our society, right? There's potential threats to the economy and the workforce. There's a potential threat to cybersecurity. There's all these different ways that they influence us. And I that, you know, there's often this sort of dismissiveness when it comes to social media, that it's not very important, that it just kind of this fluff that we do in our free time. And so I think that people seem to be taking the risks and the threats of AI more seriously. And part of that might be too that, you know, we've seen how the risks from social media played out and how the hands-off approach played out and wanna do it differently this time.
Juravich: Is there a risk, though, of pausing things, putting in regulations, and if China doesn't do that, in the long run, is it going to hurt the U.S. Because we'll be behind?
Conger: Yes, I think it could, and that's definitely a big concern, particularly in Washington, but I think for a lot of the AI labs as well, they wanna stay at the front of the frontier.
Juravich: You mentioned that your worry scale is at a medium, because you said that you think some of the fears are overblown. Some of this is being blown up bigger than it is. I mean, is that an accurate assessment? Is some of this not as bad as it sounds?
Conger: You know, I think that is that is my belief that some of this is very overblown I think a lot of the industry has been kind of fascinated with these doomsday scenarios for a long time And a lot them still feel very much like science fiction You know I think there's one Researcher in anthropic whose posts on social media got a lot attraction. He talked about there being I think at 10% existential risk for humanity And I don't think that that is where we are today, but I'm also not building this technology myself. Maybe these people are seeing things that I'm not seeing that cause them this concern. But I think from an external perspective, it does feel like we've gotten a little hysterical about this.
Juravich: And I mean, could just the regulation be more like, I don't know, making the companies keep the testing in house and just, yeah, not accidentally giving it access to the internet or something like that. I just, I mean that just seems like such a simple thing. Like, okay, you're testing something, don't let it get on the internet, but you're right.
Conger: Yes. I think that there definitely can be improvements made to the testing process that would limit some of these problems from happening. And it seems like in the race to get ahead and get to the frontier of this technology, a lot of thought has been putting into how to train the models, how to improve them, and less thought has put into the security of that process. And so I think this is a little bit of a wake-up call to the industry that they need to be a lot more careful about what's happening in these training environments.
Juravich: Yeah. Yeah. And then let's just talk just to end on the economic considerations here. How much money is at stake if there is a pause? Like if regulators in Washington actually said everyone stop developing AI, give us six months to write some rules, like will money be lost?
Conger: I think a significant amount of money is on the table here. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are coming up on their initial public offerings. Anthropic has indicated that they might want to do that this year, OpenAI perhaps early next year. And those are billion, if not trillion dollar deals. So there is, I think, a significant financial risk here that the companies are dealing with if they do choose to take a full pause.
Juravich: But so and and what would that what would that mean? Like the I will the companies go out of business. I just don't. Yeah. I just like like oh well. Like that's what I'm saying. Like yeah. Will they go out. Of business. Does that matter.
Conger: I don't think that they would go out of business. That doesn't seem like a realistic scenario to me, but it is possible that they lose their edge in the development of the technology and I think it's certainly probable that they upset and lose money for investors. And so those are really powerful pressures that I think are keeping these companies kind of turning ahead even amid all this concern.
Juravich: So the billionaire isn't as billionaire-y. I might just say, oh, well, we can end it there with my opinion. We've been talking about AI and worldwide fears and industry calling for a pause and what's next with New York Times technology reporter Kate Conger. Thank you so much for your time today, Kate. Thank you. And coming up, we're going to talk about some new headphone technology and some pretty new crockpots in new colors. That's when Tech Tuesday from All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. And today we're gonna talk about some new headphone technology, Crock-Pot being on a mission to improve your kitchen's esthetics, and Roku expanding its services. Joining us now is Russell Holly, Director of Commerce, Content at CNET. Welcome back to All Sides, Russell.
Russell Holly: Thank you.
Juravich: So Bose has released its new sport open earbuds. There is an effort to improve comfort, battery life and open ear awareness features. Plus they also have a second generation of the ultra open earbuds, so Russell let's just start with like what's an open earbud? Ha ha ha!
Holly: Yeah, so, you know, we're all familiar with the classic earbud that you wedge inside of your ear and through either friction or a clip that goes around your ear, you get to enjoy the music that's there without anything falling out of your ears. Tech companies have been trying to modify this design for probably 20 years, and there have been various bits of success, but when you're not thinking about AirPods, the next ones that come up are open earbuds. Last year several fitness-focused audio companies, including Shocks and Bose and several others, started making these pinch-style earbuds, where instead of going all the way in your ear, it's a tiny speaker that points at your ear. And it just kind of clips on like an ear cuff that has just enough friction for you to be able to run or do jumping jacks or things like that, and not have to worry about them falling out, but still delivering pretty reasonable audio quality to just you and not the people around you.
Juravich: All right, so Bose is releasing two new earbud releases in the same month. I mean, what sets them apart? One is called Sport and one is called Ultra.
Holly: Yeah, so Ultra is the idea from last year that has been ramped up with a bunch of new ideas, and this includes some very special tech that is listening to when you are listening, and if you start talking, it pauses the music automatically and it will return the music once you have stopped talking. It has some really great stuff about making sure that the audio is as focused on you as possible and does very little what is called bleeding out so that other people can hear it. If you've ever been on a bus or a subway and somebody is listening to some of these open ear headphones and you are not, every once in a while you can hear what it is that they're listening to and you know, we're just not always into the same books.
Juravich: All right. So what are the sport ones? What's the difference between that and the Ultra?
Holly: The sport ones are really just focused on being able to be lightweight and stay on your ear and have enough battery life to get you through a long workout. These are also $100 cheaper than the Ultra. The Ultra is going to start and be kind of the more expensive, what Bose might call you know, kind of their premium product at 300 and the the sport open buds are going to be 200.
Juravich: So in a previous CNET article, it seems like the tester audience thought that the first generation of these ultra open earbuds were comfortable, but they were hesitant about the $300 price on these earbuds. So why would they want the advanced version at the same price?
Holly: The argument that Bose is making here is that you can, in fact, have sport earbuds that you would use in your day-to-day life. And that $300 price tag for sport earbuds, it's really challenging if you're thinking about, do I need to have a separate set of headphones for when I'm in an airplane or if I'm sitting on my couch and my partner doesn't want to hear the thing that I'm listening to. The argument Bose is is making is that they've gotten so good at the kind of audio shaping, as they call it, for things like if you are watching a movie, then it has a kind of broader, deeper sound versus if you're out and about with other people. The argument is that you can, in fact, just own one set of headphones and have them be open headphones. Whether or not that turns out to be true for a large number of people isn't really what Bose does. They are a company that is known for premium audio and that there are just certain groups of people willing to pay that higher price. But I think having that $200 version is them, is Bose as a company stepping back and realizing that not everybody's going to put $300 down for something like these.
Juravich: Yeah, and what you just mentioned about watching a movie and it sounding different, that's called cinema mode. Why do we want that?
Holly: Cinema mode just makes something feel more like the audio that you get sitting in a theater. So there's some depth to the audio that not to go so far as echo, but to feel like the audio is coming from a larger space. This is something that a lot of different companies have been playing with when it comes to things like 360 degree audio, which is available on a lot of different speakers now. And it's really just using audio to create the illusion of depth and size.
Juravich: And what about this idea of the clip-on earbud? Is this the new era of earbuds? Are we all gonna be clipping them to our ear?
Holly: This is one where I'm pretty torn. I personally use clip-on earbuds on a daily basis. The ones that I use are not from Bose, they are from Shocks. And I use them anytime I'm doing pretty much anything either on my bike or outside. I really enjoy them for what it is that they're for. The conversation that you and I are having right now, I have over-the-ear headphones on. I would not use those earbuds for a conversation between the two of us. One, because the microphones aren't quite as good for this kind of conversation, but also the comfort level for a five-hour flight or something like that. I'm just always gonna want something a little larger with a longer battery life, especially, to be able to deliver that kind of experience. But there just aren't as many people, especially here in September of 2026 that think that owning $500 worth of different kinds of headphones for every occasion is a practical way to spend your money.
Juravich: Yeah, I mean, having the big, over-the-ear Bose headphones that come in all those pretty colors, I feel like I wouldn't lose them if I spent several hundred dollars on them. But the earbud, I, I've been, it will fall out and go under the bed. And I, you know, I don't know. I just feel, what if you lose it? I will say that like. Yeah.
Holly: I will say that they're very difficult to lose in both the way that they fall out and there is, almost all of these earbuds now have a mode where you say that it's lost and they produce a tone for you to be able to find if you lost it on the couch or something like that. I think the other thing is just, you know, for over the year headphones, nobody wants to wear those when they're working out. It's really gross to, you know, have all of that happen around your head. So yeah, I do think that it is an interesting conversation. There will be some folks that are interested in having two sets headphones or headphones that are separate for when you're swimming, in the case of my mother-in-law. You know, there are just a lot of different ways in which you can do that sort of thing. But I think ultimately, you know, if you're looking for a set of earbuds that you're going to be able to do for as many things as possible, Bose is trying really hard to make the argument that these are those. And I think you're going to want to hear them first before you make that decision.
Juravich: Okay, and just to end on for clip on earbuds, will Apple ever make clip on ear buds?
Holly: I think Apple's got such an intentionally iconic design with AirPods that shifting from that design is something we're probably not going to see anytime soon. But if these do become overwhelmingly popular, it would not surprise me if not the AirPod brand, but the Beats brand picks up a different shape like this.
Juravich: I mean, it took Apple a while before it came into the foldable phone, so they're just late adopters. They let everybody else figure it out first. This is Tech Tuesday from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News, and we are talking with Russell Holley, Director of Commerce Content at CNET. And now we're going to talk about some appliance esthetics. So Krockpot is partnering with Valspar, the paint company, and debuting six new slow Cooker colors for their fall collection, with paint swatches to match. In a statement by Newell Brands, that's the parent company of Crock-Pot, the senior manager said the purpose of this feature is to create spaces that feel personal and reflect the way people live. So how, I mean, do people really want their kitchen to match their Crock Pot, Rezl?
Holly: I think kitchen appliances, kitchens in general, there is such a mix of opinions there. You either have very strong opinions about the esthetics of your kitchen or it is the stuff that you could afford at the time in the place that you are. It's difficult for me to have a whole lot of a leg to stand on here. My entire kitchen is delightfully Star Wars themed and they didn't make a crock pot for me because these are all focused on very like pastel-y colors with really exciting names like purple potato and chai cream and ocean fog that are these just very kind of subtle colors that are designed to, you know, accent a room.
Juravich: Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of blues in this color list too. Is blue the new orange this fall or something?
Holly: I think it must be yeah that that you know kind of teal and and you know the the kind of mix in that ocean spray kind of color I think is is that mix but it does you know have some some of those darker like sagey colors and that purple potato is a really deep color of purple that I'm now describing for people who are listening and I'm going to stop doing that.
Juravich: That, well, yeah, I mean, the colors are pretty, right? So if you want to pay for a crockpot and then what Valspar is hoping is that you'll get the paint swatch and paint your kitchen to match your crock pot or.
Holly: I think that that's right, is that it'll all be a part of one thing, you know, like interior decorators will be able to kind of pull all of this together as a single set of ideas, and it likely won't stop here. KitchenAid is also looking at its next set of stand mixers being in very fancy colors, so I suspect that this will be kind of a luxury thing that happens for the next little while, is appliances getting back into bright colors, which we never should have gotten rid of. The millennial gray thing was a mistake.
Juravich: Yes, lots of gray, lots of whites, but I feel like people tend to have their kitchen match around like, I don't know, maybe their cabinets, not around a crock pot. So well, I guess we'll see. We'll see how popular these are. But the is the idea that everyone like for your holiday gift, you should get them a fancy crockpot and a pretty color.
Holly: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting time, right? We know that La Croixette just announced a whole line of really high-end, you know, kind of stove pots and things like that that are all Star Trek themed. Oh, of course, yes. So I think that we're, I don't think that there's one correct answer here. I think just depends on the kind of home you want to have.
Juravich: Yes, something for everyone. All right, well, our final topic is we're going to talk about streaming service bundles and the evolution of television access. So a week ago, Roku announced that it will be adding 30 new bundles to its streaming services in the US and Mexico. And this is a new addition for the streaming platform, not like a seasonal deal. So first of all, is Roku still popular amongst the streaming services, like do people like Roku?
Holly: The interesting thing about Roku is that it is the most popular hardware platform in both the United States and in the UK that nobody knows that you have in your house.
Speaker 3: Hmm
Holly: Roku, they're very inexpensive, they load every single app that you could possibly want, they work pretty effortlessly, the remotes are very easy to use, there are no touch buttons anywhere. So very popular with folks who struggle with learning a new remote control. Struggle for the people who hate.
Juravich: Struggle the people who hate the Apple Apple TV room
Holly: Exactly. So these TVs, you know, there are folks who will spend maybe $200 and have one of these in every room in the house. You know, for very little, whereas $200 right now doesn't even cover the cost of a single Apple TV. So it's an easy choice for a lot of households to make. And what Roku is now hoping to kind of get in there is that you're not just making the hardware purchase from them, that you are also getting in on some of this monthly revenue. We need some of those monthly subscriptions in order to make things and so we are turning to our old friend television bundles. The thing that when we left cable, we were so sad that did not come with us were the streaming bundles Basically, if you buy these bundles through either the Roku channel or the Rokua app, then you get them for cheaper than if you were paying for those services separately. So for an example, if your are a fan of stars and a fan of MGM Plus, if had those both together, it would normally cost 20 bucks a month. If you're buying them through Roku together, It's 14 bucks a month And there are a bunch of little examples like this, including Brit Box and BBC, Fox and Fox Nation, like there are there are lot of different ways that you can kind of bundle these things up and Roku seems to think that this is the way to go moving forward because they're promising more before the end of the year.
Juravich: I mean, in general, people are complaining, though, about streamflation, streaming platforms offering services. Some of them are like $50 a month. Everyone's bundling everything together. I think I have Hulu plus Disney Plus, or I don't know, it all comes together now. It just is like, it gets, it's, there's too much. I think we're gonna see a lot
Holly: I think we're gonna see a lot of this kind of thing as we move into the holiday season, because this is when folks tend to pick up new or try other streaming services. And historically, it's been Amazon that has tried to kind of bundle things together as discounts during things like Prime Day or Black Friday. But I think that we're going to see quite a bit in the way of competition for this sort of thing as we moved into the end of the year. So if you are not happy with the amount you're paying for your streaming service, keep an eye out for this kind thing, because I think these kind of discounts are going to be really popular this year.
Juravich: I feel like there's just simply too many choices. We can't subscribe to them all. We can, and everything doesn't bundle together, right? Even if you wanted it to bundle, you have to find the bundle that works for you. I mean, where does it end? When does this all just become cable again?
Holly: I think we've reached that point. I think I very much remember choosing cable bundles actually being a little easier than this.
Juravich: Yes, that's what I feel like. When I looked at Roku offering 30 different bundles and I looked it that list and I was like, but what I would have picked on that list is I want to bundle HBO with Britbox, but that wasn't an option.
Holly: Get on it Roku, you're missing out.
Juravich: Well, I'm just saying of like I was looking at everything and like what I watch You know, I pay for Brit box and I wish I had HBO. So that's what I would have bundled together So I just don't I don't understand. It's like there's too many bundles, but I can't pick what I want I don't know fix it for me Russell
Holly: I will do my level best.
Juravich: Okay, so is this gonna help Roku though? Like will people know it more? Because you said that people don't know about it. Yeah.
Holly: Yeah, I mean very much in the way that Roku, you know, is kind of the hardware layer for all of this. Roku has its own streaming service called Howdy that is only three bucks a month that nobody knows about. Okay, I've never heard of that. So I think that that is the thing is that people use Roku to get to other places and Roku is trying to kind of Center itself in a way that it is valuable in in doing these sort of things I think when when folks are starting to look at ways to kind Of tighten the budget and and figure out ways in which they can cut cost bundles like this can Be very valuable and so I think it is it is good for Roku To get this information out now they're gonna present this information to you when you turn your television on Because it will be available through the Roku app if you you know If you have these apps already installed on your TV, there's a very good chance that they will say, hey, stop paying them directly and pay that through us. And so, yeah, I think that that has the potential to be a good thing for Roku, but I also think that doing this sort of thing doesn't exist in a vacuum and competition will quickly become a race to the bottom, which means you're not actually making money as the company organizing these deals. So, yeah. I'm really curious to see how this plays out. But I think this is not the last we have heard of the bundles for this year.
Juravich: We've been talking about Bose's new headphone release, Crock-Pot's being colorful, and Roku's new streaming bundles with Russell Holly, director of commerce content at CNET. Thanks for joining us, Russell.
Holly: Thanks for having me.