The Vergecast - AI headphones and clicky phone keys

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of canceled-out cricket sounds:  03:29 - David, Andru, and Will react to prototype headphones that use AI to take noise cancellation to a whole new level.  Hear how the best ANC headphones handle real world and lab tests  We sent the top ANC headphones to a lab to test their noise-canceling abilities  The University of Washington’s Semantic Hearing project UW’s Mobile Intelligence Lab 31:30 - Michael Fisher, aka Mr. Mobile, joins the show to discuss mobile phones with physical keyboards and his latest project, “Clicks,” an iPhone case featuring an integrated keyboard. Clicks is a BlackBerry-style iPhone keyboard case designed for creators BlackBerry kills Ryan Seacrest's iPhone keyboard 56:30 - Andru Marino answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about the best microphone for recording your parents.  How to get great audio for podcast interviews Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Cancelled Out Cricket Sounds. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting in my basement about to watch Oppenheimer. Actually, I should say that differently. I'm about to finish watching Oppenheimer. I have been watching this movie for months, but something happens every time I sit down to watch Oppenheimer, which admittedly is like three hours long. So life is busy, it's hard to find three hours to watch a movie. But every single time I sit down to watch this movie, somewhere between two and like 11 minutes later,

something happens and I have to stop watching it. It's gotten to the point where Peacock's algorithm took it out of my continue watching row in the app because I just assumed Peacock was like, there's no way he's ever going to finish this movie. He can't possibly care. We'll just get rid of it. But I do care and I'm going to finish it. And today is the day.

It's Monday morning, which is a super weird time to watch this movie, but it's happening. I've got, I think, like 40 minutes left. Today is the day. It's going to be awesome. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about active noise cancellation. You might have seen a video that our team made last summer about kind of the state of

the art in those like over-eared headphones that try to cancel out subway sounds or airplane sounds or whatever else. But it turns out the tech and science underneath all of that is actually more advanced than you might see on some of those headphones. And we have a really fun story about it. Then we're going to talk about keyboards, specifically iPhone keyboards and the cases that put physical keyboards back on your iPhone. We're actually doing, I've realized, kind of an accidental mini-series in the next several weeks about keyboards, just because I think they're fascinating and we don't

talk about them enough. The ways that we talk to our devices and the tools that we use to do that matters a lot. Like when we switch to voice instead of typing on a keyboard, the way that we use our devices changes. And when we switch from a physical keyboard to an on-screen keyboard, the way that we use our phones changes. And so we're going to talk to one person who is trying to put a physical keyboard back about how that works, what it means, and what it changes.

All that is coming up in just a second, but like I said, I have 40 minutes of this movie to watch. No one else is home. It's Oppenheimer time, baby. This is the Vergecast. We'll see in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations

on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. So last summer, our video team made a video all over New York City in which they carried around this crazy looking like mannequin skull to test a bunch of headphones.

Noise cancelling is hard to explain by just talking about it. So we're going to try to share with you how it sounds by putting a bunch of noise canceling headphones on the KU100. It was all about active noise cancellation and whether different kinds of headphones could hold up. Super fun video, one of the best things we made last year. And I'm told that's actually only the very beginning of the story of what ANC can do. Will Por is here to help me explain. Will, hello.

Hello. Will, you made this video last summer, and as far as I can tell, you have not stopped thinking about it ever since. Is that a fair characterization of what's been going on? Yeah, kind of. There was an interview we did at the very end of the video that is the thing that really stuck in my brain. It was with this guy that runs an audio testing lab where we sent all these headphones, and he ranked them for us by their ANC performance. But he also made the point that the most noise cancellation is maybe not what people. actually want. Like maybe we don't want to walk around in this total vacuum of sound.

And he said in the future, it'll be about smarter noise cancellation, more user input into what you want to hear and what you don't. So that's the idea I've been carrying around with me. Okay, this is a good segue to a question that I have had for a very long time and have been too afraid to loudly ask in public in front of people. Can't wait. What is active noise cancellation? I know it's a thing. I sort of know roughly at a basic level, like, there are noises and it cancels them. Yes. What is, and there are other kinds of noise cancellation that I also don't understand. So, like, what is ANC? What are we talking about here? I am so glad you asked, and I brought Andrew along because when we did the video, I had the same

question, and I just immediately asked him that. Okay, good. Andrew Marino, welcome. Hello. What is ANC? Teach Will and I, please. Right. So active noise cancellation takes sound coming from the environment and basically sends an opposite version of that sound wave to your ear. So when combined, it basically cancels it out. This is really easy to do with sounds like a loud airplane engine or subway sounds, noise that's really predictable. So the two of you have been on this beat for a while now and have been investigating this question of how far have we come, how far can we go, and where do we actually want to go. Is that right? That's right, yeah. When we started talking and thinking about smart noise cancellation,

I started looking for who's doing this right now. And the first place I looked is Apple, because their AirPods Pro have a bunch of these smart noise control settings. They call their features adaptive audio. And it's kind of what we're talking about. It's not like full, let's just cancel out all the sound. it's more let's make some basic decisions for you about making really loud sounds more comfortable or dipping your music when you start talking to someone. I've been playing around with those features a bunch and in practice,

it's not always super clear what it's actually doing. Like there's no fine-tuning, there's no user input. You just hit the button and it tries to magically make a better soundscape for you. So that's the one place I looked and have been, playing with that is out there in the world that's a product now that has some smarts. But I also played around with a really early prototype, and I have a bunch of tape that I brought to play.

Awesome. This is super early stage, a device that could get a whole lot more specific when it comes to what you want to hear, what you don't want to hear. So I want to play some of this stuff, and we can talk about it. Yeah, let's go. Okay, so first listen to this clip. This is me sitting at a table alone in a room. I'm wearing these very prototype-looking headphones.

They've got a lot of extra wires and tape and circuit boards attached to them. There's a vacuum cleaner running right next to my chair. And a few feet away, there's a door, and someone outside is knocking on that door. That sound that we just heard is just coming from a microphone that's sitting on the table next to me. So that's just what the room sounds like. But while this is happening, this sound clip, this is what I'm hearing right now. what I'm hearing right now. Just the Knox. That's amazing. This is beyond what we have seen with noise-canceling headphones before. If you want to just hear Knox, that is not something you can

try to get. You can't tell your AirPods Pro just knocks. Where did you find this? So this comes from the University of Washington, specifically their mobile intelligence lab in the CS department, is a project that they call semantic hearing. And I got this demo from a PhD student named Malik Atani, he's one of the people who helped build the system. And you talked me through how it all works. There are these noise-cancelling headphones. They're Bose QC Ultra. They're going to suppress all of the sounds.

And then what we do is we have these binoral microphones that capture... Tape to the outside of the... Yeah. They capture sound from your environment, the way you hear it, because they're on both ears. And then we pass this through a mobile CPU, an orange pie. This thing processes audio in some way, based on the sound. the targets that you select, and then feeds it back to the headphones where it's played. So the starting point for this is a pair of headphones you actually can buy.

Yeah, so the prototype starts with off-the-shelf boats headphones that use the existing ANC to just create a clean audio slate. I see. And then the system on that orange pie listens to the full soundscape separately and picks out just the specific sounds that it's listening for, in this case a doork. We have a program that runs on the orange pie, which continuously just records audio in chunks of 8 milliseconds. Then it passes this to a neural network where it's processed with the condition that this neural network tries to extract some target class. This target class is what you select here.

Okay, we've got cat, cricket, dog, knock, and rooster. Those are the classes that you have queued up right now. all the most common noises in the world. Right, of course, anything that you would want to be selecting and deselecting, there's a smartphone screen that I have access to, and there are buttons for each one of those categories. And in each one of those cases, Malik has fed a neural network, a whole bunch of those clips,

different dog sounds and doork sounds and everything else, to train it to recognize that specific sound. I actually asked Malik to share some of the sounds that he used out of curiosity. I don't know what I was expecting to learn from that, but here are the cat sounds that he used. Very familiar with those. I had to ask because I just pictured him sifting through, and he did this. He just sifted through hundreds and hundreds of sourced cat sounds

and clean them up and fed them into the system. So the AI is trained on these categories now so that when I hit the cat button, the system will mute every sound in the world except for cat meows. So going back to the demo, I did that. I hit the cat button, Malik turned the vacuum cleaner back on, and he queued up a looping sound of that really annoying cat. Yeah, pretend like it's a regular day, lazy Sunday.

You want to play with your cat. But there's a noisy vacuum cleaner in the background. I hate it when I'm vacuuming and playing with my cat at the same time. Okay, transparency mode. My poor cat is trying to get my attention, but I can't hear him. So I'm going to flip to cat mode. Wow. That's really impressive.

It's super impressive. The sound is a little odd. To me, it sounds like the cat is meowing in a submarine. But it's super clear, and the vacuum cleaner is totally gone. And for the record, what you're hearing right now is actually a little bit better than what it sounds like in reality, because in the room I'm wearing headphones. And some of that vacuum cleaner sound is making it through the headphones. And this is what the headphones are outputting to your ears. Exactly.

Yeah, Will, you mentioned this is not for actual cats and vacuum cleaners. What is your sense of what this is actually for? Like, what are the folks working on this thinking they might be able to do with it? Yeah, I mean, the most obvious example that comes up over and over again is you're walking down the street and you want to be able to hear a car honking at you because that is a thing that's a safety thing. Sure. But you don't want to hear all the other annoying sounds.

Or the folks I talked to brought up industrial settings. where it's really loud and workers are wearing earplugs for safety, but they want to be able to talk to each other or hear sounds over the intercom or whatever else. So those are the really obvious use cases. And from playing with this really early demo, it felt like even this early demo could do that much, which is super impressive.

So you mentioned also like crickets and dogs and other things. What are some other demos that you were able to test out there? Yeah. So in theory, you can train the A, on any sound, and we played through a few different options that they had queued up. None of it was perfect. Like, there were these times where it was supposed to be muting all voices, but my voice kind of clipped into the final mix that you can hear.

I can, we can play that. Yeah, that's funky. Yeah. So, you know, rough around the edges. We went back to the barnyard and listened to all of those other different sound clips in a lot of different iterations just to see how good it was it toggling between different sounds.

Now that we've done cat and vacuum clear, we'll move on to some other classes. Let's do cat and cricket. All right. Here's transparency mode. A cat and a cricket are both trying really hard to get my attention. That's enough idea of cat.

In this demo, you couldn't hear the cat at all. You just heard the crickets? No, it was gone. Yeah, the big takeaway for me was that this system is already really good at full isolation. It just needs to make the sounds that you are hearing sound more natural. Like, that's just to my ear. That's where the work was.

It was already doing an unbelievable job at canceling out the stuff you didn't want. I'm desperate to know what the last demo he gave you was. Because I got to assume he's like ramping up in difficulty here. But there's definitely a point at which he knows this thing will fall apart. Like what was the most intense demo he gave you? Oh, we did a big finish, which was dog and a rooster and a cat. This is the most annoying farm in the world. Okay.

All right, just rooster. It's interesting. Those two, and I can see how subjective this would all be. It feels like those sounds are bleeding into each other a little bit more. I wonder if they're just a little more similar than the others. Yeah, I think it could be that some sounds are similar. Yeah. And finally, we'll do dog and cat.

This is very triggering. This is why I don't like working from home. Okay. Sorry, cat. Okay, and now I'll just pay attention to the cat. Okay, this is really impressive, but I'm stuck on two things. One is, is the idea that you will carry around a smartphone constantly selecting the noises that you want to see? Like, should I walk around saying, oh, it looks like that cat's trying to get my attention.

Let me let the cat in. Or is the future some sort of beautifully adapt. thing that understands as you're going. Did you get a sense from them, kind of how they see this eventually working? Yes. And I talked to the head of this lab all about that. But before we did that, we talked about how they're going to get to that point. That was my other question is, how do you take this from a pair of Bose headphones with a bunch of junk taped on it to an actual thing that humans can buy? So yeah, let's talk about their full roadmap from where they are now to what you're describing. The first step in that process is just getting better at doing all of these

tasks, and that means feeding their model a whole lot more data. More cricket sounds. So many more cricket sounds, and grasshopper sounds, and cicada sounds, and just basically train it to recognize a million more categories of sounds and to recognize all those individual sounds just a lot more accurately. And if they can do that and do that super well, then the possible use cases just explode. You could totally see this being applied to different tasks. Like, say, I want to not just listen to sounds, but specific people. Like, I want to listen to you in a conversation so I can maybe have some representation of how

you sound like, and then I can, you know, just pick up your sound as we speak, as we have a conversation, even if there's lots of other people around us. So all the current headphones right now, they do it really well because they, they can predict when these sounds are coming. So when you're in the airplane, you know these sounds are going to be 10 seconds from now in 10 seconds before. But a bird sound, a cat meowing, crickets chirping, you don't know when those are coming. So how would they be able to predict?

They would have to move pretty fast on the device. Exactly. That's the problem of what they call transient sounds. And that's a big hurdle for existing ANC technology. This system is really good at it, but it needs to process the incoming audio super, super fast. There's no time to send it to the cloud for processing. There isn't really even time to send the incoming audio to your phones processor over Bluetooth. You would just end up with a lag between what you're hearing and what your eyes are actually seeing,

which is just a complete non-starter. So all of the work that we're talking about doing has to happen on board the headphones themselves. If we can get this model to be much, much more efficient through lots of just standard machine learning techniques, then we can fit a more capable model into this small device. Another way to also help on the hardware side is, you know, in the recent few years, there's been lots and lots of companies that work on designing AI chips that can do a large, large amount of computation with very low power consumption, and those things are very promising. So you've just made me imagine what amounts to like a pair of headphones with a GPU attached,

which I think is like literally what he's describing. And that both seems cool and like maybe we're all this is going, but also very expensive, very big and maybe very far away. What is the sense of how we get from literally strapping like an Nvidia GPU to my face to the thing he's describing, which I think ultimately it has to look like a pair of those headphones, right? We're not going to take anything that doesn't look like a pair of those headphones. This is where we'll have to see. They're talking about a hearing aid-sized form factor.

They want to go much, much smaller. And they think that they can do it with these purpose-built, lightweight chips that are really good at running AI systems. So they're playing with all of the chips that are very new and newly available. And they're sort of doing all of these different things at the same time. They're doing the software optimization. and they're feeding the model, all this more data, and they're working on the hardware, too, to shrink it as quickly as possible.

And they think they have the raw materials to do that pretty soon. So we have like an academic lab masquerading as like a full-stack electronics company here. Yeah, absolutely. That's the fun thing about this lab in particular is that it's very holistic. Oh, what about the user interface?

Am I going to be like asking Siri every 10 seconds? Like, did you hear my cat? Is my cat meowing? So they're thinking a lot. about this because even when I was playing with this demo, I was like, oh, God, five buttons. This is just five buttons. In the real world, you would need five million buttons to actually dial in the soundscape that you want.

So obviously you need some sort of automation here. And the lab is looking at different AI-assisted ways to do this. So this whole thing is going to be AIs on AIs. But I talked to the head of the Mobile Intelligence Lab, Shiam Golokoda, about exactly this. We're going to have some systems in the next few months to a year on trying to go away slowly from actually having the user to pick different kinds of sounds to less and less involvement of the user itself. You can imagine a system where the AI automatically learns what you want to listen to. And I think that's something which we are building towards. And I think by the end of the year, hopefully we can actually have a system where the AI would automatically learn what you want to listen to.

That is ambitious. Yeah. Yeah. They're juggling a lot of balls. at the same time here. And the end goal that Shiam is envisioning is a system that is using data from, say, your smartphone to think and learn about where you are, what you're doing, and start to make those decisions, kind of with as much or as little input as you want as to what you're hearing and what you're not. So say, you know, again, you're living in a busy city with lots of

loud traffic, but you're inside your house. So that's exactly the thing. Like, clearly, AI can tell, depending on my motion and my IMU, whether I'm moving as much, where am I, it knows my GPS location, so it knows that I'm in a house. Does it really need me to listen to like the sounds of the hons? Not really. But if I'm on a street, maybe it can. Because I'm walking on the street or I'm in a car, it should potentially be like, you need to hear these honks. Although then the next place my brain goes is how to make sure that it's doing that safely and reliably because there's one thing we've watched from Tesla autopilot to, you know, chat GPT hallucinating to whatever else. It's like there's an asterisk on so many of these tasks

that we just sort of let the AI take care of. And it strikes me that trusting your headphones to decide when you need to hear a car horn or not could be a high-stakes thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's definitely something which has to be integrated in these systems. And it could be that certain things, like, if I'm actually in the house, that's when you remove all these ambient sounds. But it's just like hard-coded saying that you cannot remove certain things in outdoor environments where you know that it's important. But that's an extremely important point, which is like when we deploy these things at scale and have this thing automatically learn, you got to have certain rules, which prioritize safety over functionality,

I think. The thing that's being described here is so beautiful and smart and so non-existent in the real world, that it's like, it's like what we talk about was self-driving, right? Like if people weren't weird and didn't make strange decisions and pedestrians and bicycles didn't exist, self-driving cars would be awesome. So easy, so great. But the world is a weird, messy place full of edge cases. Yeah. And that's where we just haven't seen that whole half of this prototype.

They have proven out that they can make crickets go away. Which is impressive. Which is impressive. And it's like you can see a roadmap to extracting a million other sounds based. on that. And then this bigger end state of dialing in exactly what you want is the loftier thing. And there's a lot of work to be done there. But if they can figure out even some of this stuff, you can imagine, you know, them getting to a really interesting product. Shiam is interested in smart hearing aids. You can see how anyone with a hearing aid could use even a portion of this

technology, anyone with a sound sensitivity, I use noise cancellation just to turn the world down to keep my anxiety in check. So I would love to be able to dial in that sound a little bit more. Shiam made the argument, too, that a lot of us just live in a very noisy world, and noise just as a thing that we're all confronted with is bad for everybody. And it actually does impact your health. There are studies which say that noise pollution affects your sleep and that ends up affecting your lifespan. So I do think that having this kind of a capability where people can control their environment is this not a toy.

I think it actually can have a meaningful impact on the quality of life and sleep. And a lot of things which I think are extremely important for humans to thrive and not just survive. So, I mean, wherever this specific prototype lands, we're definitely leaving the fancy earplugs era of noise cancellation and entering an era that is much more specific and bespoke and a little bit smarter, what that looks like TBD. But I am very excited about that concept. I am too. And I wonder, Andrew, just to come all the way back around to this idea of what we were talking about at the very beginning with what active noise cancellation does, it seems like knowing this kind of stuff where you can say, like, not only is this an external sound and I want to get rid of it, but I know specifically

which external sound it is. I think even leaving aside sort of that big giant grand vision, it just feels like that step alone does a lot. Oh, totally. I mean, to be able to walk into a store and the headphones know I'm in a store and I'm going to be talking to someone checking out, or I have a library of sounds that are unique to my experience that I would like to tune out. And the sounds are only at this specific coffee shop that I go to study. That's super compelling to me. Do I want my headphones to know where I am at all times? I'm not sure.

Right. But there's a lot of awesome possibilities of just tuning things out and tuning things in wherever you are. Yeah, I think the self-driving example just keeps feeling more and more true to me as we talk about this, that the first thing where it's like, okay, my car can park itself. and will stay in its lane if I try to drift out of it because I'm not paying attention, right? Doable, awesome. If you extend that all the way out to all the cars in the road will drive themselves and robot taxis will be everywhere, like you've sort of lost me.

Maybe it'll happen someday in the future. But that doesn't make the first thing any less cool. And I feel like there's a lot of that in here too where it's like even just boil it all the way down, this is going to make noise cancellation better because the cats get through my headphones now and they can stop getting through my headphones once we get this. tech. Totally. And I think that no matter how far into that idealized end state they get, they're very confident that they can get a lot farther very quickly. They have access to these chips. The software is improving very quickly. So they have a lot of ambitions for this year. They think they can

get to a much, much smaller form factor by the end of this year, for example. And they have a lot more very specific ideas for that sort of filtration step. So, yeah, it's, you know, for me, that very, very limited demo was impressive enough, and they had enough plans for this year that I'm going to be following that lab and see what they come up with next, because I think it's going to be an interesting year for it. Do you think at the end of this, they're going to try to sell me headphones? Like, what's their game plan here? Are they going to spin out a company and try to be a headphone player?

Are they going to try and work with some of the folks out there? Did you get any sense of how they want to get this out in the world? They seemed open to that. You know, they're an academic department. They're talking about commercialization. You know, they're like a lot of academics. They're walking this fine line between, you know, just moving this technology forward and experimenting with it, but also like knowing that they've got something and they feel like

they are potentially ahead of a lot of big tech companies on this. So they are thinking in those terms. And I think that's one of the reasons they're trying to work as quickly as they are. Yeah, it does seem like this is happening fast. I feel like, Andrew, you were the one running around New York with the head on the subway a year ago. This strikes me as something that a lot of those companies building A&C headphones are probably also thinking about, like, do you think this is the next turn for a lot of those companies? And is this going to be the next thing that makes these headphones better for people? I think so.

And I know Bose is thinking about it a lot as the next generation of noise cancellation. Apple is already trying to do the adaptive things, as we mentioned. but right now it's just boosting things instead of taking things out. So if there's a world where they can remove the dogs out of Will's room while he's recording a podcast. I mean, there's just like endless possibilities. There was a dog button on that prototype. We just need that prototype and we'll be fine. Well, by this time next year, the Vergecast will be a listenable podcast.

It's going to be great. Thank you and sorry. All right. We got to take a quick break and then we're going to talk keyboards. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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look and work. Some of them twisted open, some of them slid open, some of them flipped open, and a lot of them had physical keyboards. And then the iPhone, all at once, kind of upended that. Here's Steve Jobs at the original iPhone launch in 2007, explaining what he saw as the problem with hardware keyboards. Here's four smartphones, right? Motorola Q, the Blackberry, Palm Trio, Nokia E-62, the usual suspects. What's wrong with their user interfaces? Well, the problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there.

It's this stuff right here. They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can't run around and add a button to these things. They're already shipped. It's a good take, right? And history proved him pretty much correct, which is why virtually every phone on the planet now has a virtual on-screen keyboard instead

of a big physical one underneath. Jobs did definitely have it right, but not all right. Because there are things I think a lot of people miss about physical keyboards. You can type faster on physical keyboards. That's just true. There's plenty of evidence for that. You can type without looking at your phone so much. You can type without the keyboard taking up like 40% of the screen.

And so over the years, various people have tried to bring back the keyboard to the smartphone. Remember way back when Ryan Seacrest was out there hawking a case called typo that put a keyboard back underneath your iPhone. This is how we explained it in an interview with TechCrunch. This has changed my life. I literally was suffocating, thinking about how I was going to work every day because this is my office. You know, the tablet and the phone, that's how I work. I have incoming emails from everybody that I work with and for my partners, and this is how I respond and can respond quickly and be able to actually type more than two sentences. I get it, Ryan, I feel that too. But typo didn't really work.

out. And none of the other projects trying to do this did either. And yet now, all these years later, there's another company trying to pull it off. It's called Clicks, and it's co-founded by a guy you might have heard of. I'm Michael Fisher, aka Mr. Mobile, or Captain Two Phones. Take your pick. Michael's a longtime creator and phone reviewer, and he knows this space better than most, which made it, frankly, all the more surprising that this is a thing he decided to do. So I brought him onto the show to figure out whether this idea has a chance to really succeed, why he's convinced there's still room for a physical keyboard on your iPhone, and what it takes to make a really great, tiny little keyboard.

And we just started the story at the beginning. Why would you, in the year 2024, set out to build a physical smartphone keyboard? Oddly, the thing that was the germ of clicks came to me. It didn't originate from my brain. I got a call from a guy you probably are familiar with him, Crackberry Kevin. It's a guy who helped me build Mr. Mobile in the first place, kind of like one of my closer friends in the business.

And he said, I got to show you something. I will absolutely kill you if you show anybody else what this is. And he sends me this 3D render. And you know, you and I are in the same business for a lot of my day. You know what it's like to get something in your inbox that's like, you look at it, you take a beat and you say, oh my God, you crazy bastards, you actually did it. So I think that's what I said out loud. But it was just a render.

It wasn't even a product. It was just this very obviously an iPhone inserted into a case with a, with a keyboard. That looks nothing like it currently does. And I said in a profound demonstration of how little business foresight I have, I said, you know, Mr. Mobile has to have the exclusive on this, right? That's good. Always thinking one step ahead, I guess. What an idiot. So within a week, though, you know, I'm giving so much product feedback. We're talking all the time. It's very obvious that we should be working together on this. Turns out that's what Kevin had in mind the whole time. So I come board. We finish building the company with the guys who full credit, deserve credit for the initial

germ of this idea in the first place, the veterans from FX Tech, the last company to make a truly great Android, you know, sliding keyboard smartphone. And that was, dude, that was April of 2023. Oh, wow, that was fast. Yeah, by January at CES, we had a product that we were able to, we were ready to ship. So it, what fast is right. It was insane. What I like about that, though, is that is a group of people who are maybe most prone to be. incorrectly nostalgic about keyboards, right? You have some of the world's foremost Blackberry people. You have you who has just never stopped making videos about the Palm Prix.

True. And you have a bunch of people who have like made these things in the past. So how do you check yourself against like, boy, I wish the world still existed in which we wanted keyboards versus like this is a thing we should do and bring it back? Or maybe you don't. You just soldier through and hope other people feel the same way you do. I think there was an element of that, really. I mean, one of the things we knew is we had a lot of smart people on board, right? And I won't give you the whole marketing pitch of everything, but we really do have the best people in the roles that need to be within the company and the most expertise there is.

And at no point, you know, did we check ourselves all the time? Yes, but at no point did anyone say, you know, I don't think this is the time. Really, what I had to be sold on this because I was a little, I turned on my skepticism node for a hot second. I said, guys, is this it? Like, no young person is going to even want a single physical button on this thing. that they're like, what's going on? And it turns out that the time was right, not only for a variety of unrelated reasons,

but because you can introduce this as a new concept to somebody like, not to name drop, Max Weinbach, who was like our most difficult briefing at CES. He's like, he's like 20, 22, and he's just like, I think this is ridiculous. But then you show him what happens when you are using, you know, Instagram Live, and you have your entire screen there, and you go to type something,

and the virtual keyboard doesn't eat up 40% of it. Or you show somebody a keyboard shortcut, And you're like, wait, what did you do? And I'm like, well, I just hit the space bar and it advanced the screen for me or I hit, you know, whatever, drop the notification shade. That's part of the fun. All the BlackBerry people know this stuff already. All the, you know, the people who had a Palm Trio like you and I maybe know all these things. And to introduce it to somebody who was not alive when the BlackBerry was a thing, it's pretty cool.

That's interesting. So we're actually like past nostalgia for a lot of people where it's so far gone that it's actually a new thing again. Yeah, it's a full circle. Exactly right. But I would imagine for you as somebody who has used these things but not built them before, part of the process is just sort of learning how to learn a keyboard and like the vocabulary of it. And what it means for a keyboard to be good or bad. Because I think as a user, you have this instinctive feel.

But I have to imagine that at some level there is like an objective measure of a good keyboard that you have to learn how to reckon with in this process. There is. So like the first prototype of clicks I got to use had these domed transatlomed. transparent key caps. So we printed the characters below the surface of the key, like a Palm Prix, right? And because I'm so forever in love with the Palm Prix until I die, I loved it. And I was like, oh, this looks so good. And this is the language we should be going for.

And perfect. Well, it turns out, though, that when you make a domed transparent key that is perfectly circular in the design we were using, it looks great from head on. And then you tilt that phone by 20 degrees. And you can't tell what the letter is. Because there's visual warping, right? There's the skewing that happens. You're like, is that a semicolon or a comma? I don't know what I'm doing anymore.

So very quickly, we had to make little decisions like that, like, well, let's see what flat polycarbonate keys with, you know, satin printed top layer paint looks like. Well, turns out that's a lot better. So there's kind of major changes early on. What I found surprising is you and I, we've covered phones a long time. You know how early on designs get locked in. And you see people talking about, why didn't they just make? this change because we were giving them feedback after the unveiling. It's like, well, because they were been sitting at retail boxes for three months at this point. With something like clicks, though,

we were making changes right up until the end. At CES, we got the final keyboard while we were at the show. The thing we showed everybody was kind of like a second to last revision. The final keyboard came in. It wasn't even built into the case. We're carrying around like a component with no paint on it or anything. It's just like, okay, don't look at this. This is gross. But just close your eyes and feel it. And everyone we showed that to, we got the final sign off on it. Kevin was so excited. You're like, oh, that's it. Every nerd we trust has signed off on that. So, dude, I'd go on forever. We had like 100 revisions. It was crazy. I will say I am most fascinated by like the last handful because I think I would assume, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but that you get

through kind of 80% of the problem fairly quickly. And you settle on like the rough idea of the thing that you want. And then you spend like the rest of your life until the, the heat death of the universe debating, like, tiny millimeters of everything. But that stuff does matter in these really, like, hard to understand ways. So, like, the last 10 revisions, I think, must have been so interesting and weird to go through. They were so wild because you're fighting, you're trying to integrate your personal history without being a, you know, without being slavish to it, right? So a good example is the shift and alt keys, right up until close to the end, they were swapped. And I kept trying to switch to alternate characters and I kept messing it up.

And I'm like, all right, is this muscle memory? or what? And we talked about it. We kind of went back and forth. Got the whole team involved. And it was like, no, we got to swap those keys. And once we did, everything felt right again. Because what do you know, you find the corner more easily. My least favorite change, I think I talked about in my video, was I want that old number pad. I want the, you know, the 3x3, BlackBerry Palm Trio kind of number pad on the keyboard. Somebody much smarter than me on the team said, look, if we're designing the best iPhone physical keyboard, you got to design it like the iOS virtual keyboard. You got to give the number row up top.

I said, I hate that you're right. I hate it, but you're right. I can't say you're wrong. That's what we got to do. So little tiny changes like that. Have you gone back and retested all the old physical keyboards? It's so weird because I was using the Palm Prix, obviously, most recently. And I was like, I remember writing for this keyboard back in the day when I owned it in 2009.

And I pick it up now and I'm like, ooh, those keys barely move at all. And the Centro, right, where I was like, I could type fine on this in 2008. Nope. Even in 2008, I was like, this is too small with the Central. I couldn't do it. Yeah. Well, you could use the stylus on the buttons, though, which was great. That is true.

But other surprises, and the other way, I'll get off WebOS in a second, but real quick, the HPVere. World's tiniest keyboard, phone that a lot of people made fun of, very good keyboard for the footprint. And for me, best keyboard I ever used but did not own, Sidekick 2. Oh, yeah. They're like lovely, clicky travel and feedback and also covered in that delightful silicon. rubber that held on to your thumbs. Oh, man. Yeah. What's your, what's your favorite keyboard of all time if you don't mind me asking? I think if you made me pick two, it would be the trio 650, which I loved to pieces. I loved that phone. And the Motorola queue, which I actually think if you

made me pick one is probably my answer. That keyword was amazing. I love it. Why I think the queue worked is because you had this nice interplay of materials. They were plastic hard keys, which doesn't sound nice, but the phone was soft touch. That's one of the things we were doing on clicks actually pretty late was once we had the keys locked in, I was like, there's something's still weird and missing about this, and it turned out it's what's around back. So we ended up putting that stamp, like, vegan leather backplate on there to make it feel, you know, to give you the entire tactile experience, because you got, you know, eight other fingers that you got to worry about when you're typing, right? What do they feel? But if you look at those keys in cross-section,

you'll notice they're domed over the top, too. And that helps with determining, separating of keys by touch. So you'll always have an easier time on a domed keyboard than you will on something where it's all crowded together, like on the bold. And the bold didn't do that because it was a better typing experience. The bold did that because BlackBerry wanted a narrower phone. So that's why you had those triangular frets in the corners. So they're like, the science of this stuff is fascinating. And I'm so glad it's not lost to history because you can still talk to the people who designed it. They're like, oh, this is why you did this. These are smart ideas. It's good to bring some of them back. Tell me also about doing this in kind of the iPhone era,

Because I think people have tried and failed at this in part because the iPhone, it's good at what it does already. Yes. How do you, like, put those two things together? First of all, one frankly made our jobs a lot easier is that you don't have to do anything with clicks. You don't have to install our app if you don't want to. You literally plug an iPhone in and the iPhone goes, you know, which uses a lightning port or the USB port. And the iPhone says, oh, that's a physical keyboard. Because all the hooks that it needs are built into iOS to begin with.

So you just start typing. And it's like, okay, well, it turns out this product can handle it very well. And it's not nothing that that's the case, by the way. And I think a lot of people would be surprised that that's the case because there just isn't really a reason for the iPhone to do that. But it is surprisingly receptive to the existence of a physical keyboard. I think in terms of like a philosophical thing, I had a little bit of the same problem grasping it at first. It was like, gosh, what are we building? And then somebody said something very smart.

And they said, look, nobody looks twice. Nobody thinks twice. When you use an iPad with a magic keyboard, and then you say, well, I don't really need the keyboard right now, so you take it off. And then later you're going to write an email and you put the keyboard back on.

Like, that is the definition of normal use case for that product. Why shouldn't the same thing be true of the phone? And the minute somebody put it in that lens for me, I was like, oh, okay, good. And, you know, we kind of hedge a little bit too because there's a button on clicks so you can hit to call up the virtual keyboard.

So, like, you know, there are times, man, where I'm walking around and I'm like, I do not want to type on a physical keyboard with one hand. It is annoying and slow and I don't like it. So that's the virtual keyboard. And I can swipe around and stuff and I can use emojis and then I can put it away. So like it's really about the adaptability for me. Like I, you know, it's eliminating buttons.

Yeah, good call. Had to do it. But it turns out there's a lot that you miss. So why not just have buttons when you want them? That was kind of our guiding philosophy after we figured out that we could actually make it. What have you seen in terms of like surprising cool stuff that you can do on the iPhone? I mean, one of things, you know, you've mentioned and I've seen you talk about elsewhere, is just added screen real estate, right? Like, you don't realize how big your phone screen is until you can actually see the whole thing.

It's so annoying. Which I think is real. I also wonder, like, you've been using these things longer than just about anybody, right? Like, what have you seen in your own kind of phone usage life that is helped by a physical keyboard like this? Yeah. One of the, so the example that they make me do, that my colleagues make me do on video, because you're the creator. You're the influencer. Do the live Instagram streaming thing and typing while you do it.

I'm like, I don't care about that. What I care about is I'm in 85 group chats, right? And when you're in a group chat and you're looking at all the context of what people have said before and then you go to respond and that virtual keyboard pops up and then it clears half the screen, stop. So I love using clicks for that specifically. But it's kind of like an Easter egg hunt. There are all the hotkey shortcuts that work on the magic keyboard, or at least a lot of them

work and clicks too. So there's that. And I go into every app and I try the old BlackBerry shortcuts. Can I hit T to go to the top? No, I can't. What does space bar do? Oh, that scrolls. Okay. Well, this phone is really tall and now with clicks, it's even taller. So how do I get to the notification shade? Does Globe N work? Weirdly, yes, it does. And what is about shift space? Oh, that goes the other way. And like, just there are so many little old habits that I sort of forgot about from the days of reviewing all the old QWERTY phones. And again, to iOS is great credit. They didn't rip any of that stuff out. It's all just sitting there waiting to be utilized. My favorite is Globe N. You know, Safari's got a ton of. them, but I mostly just use the space part of scroll because I'm lazy. Does it have the thing that I loved so much about the BlackBerry's, which is that if you're

on the home screen and you just start typing, something happens? So on iOS, you have to do, you have to invoke Spotlight like you would on a MacBook. So you do Command Space and then you pop up. Craig Federigi, if you're listening, and I know that you are, just get rid of that. Just let me start typing and it should pop up the spotlight. Right. Do you remember that on the BlackBerry? It was the best.

You're like, I want to go to my calendar. I'm just going to go to my calendar. pull my phone out on my pocket and hit CAL and it's going to take me to my calendar. But I think, I mean, that comes back to kind of the question about, you know, all the other affordances we've made for the ways that people use phones now, right? Like, I think the swipe typing is an interesting one. And my sense is that has kind of come and gone. And just purely anecdotally, everybody I know who uses Android knows about the swipe typing

and uses it, especially when you're using your phone with one hand, no one I know who uses an iPhone even knows that that's a thing you can do. And like the spacebar trick to move the cursor. Yes. is my favorite party trick because no one knows that's a thing. And you show them and it just blows their mind to pieces. But that's the kind of stuff that all of these companies have spent this much time working on because they didn't have physical keyboards. And in a funny way, they're trying to solve for the problems of physical keyboards.

Right. But also, like, once you got rid of them, you had to figure out a better way to move a cursor because you didn't have arrow buttons anymore. And like, you know, it's great as arrow buttons. But now we've sort of come past that. And so now you have to go back and say, okay, we have a physical keyboard. how do we make it do some touchscreen things? Yes. Which is an interesting challenge.

If you're utterly insane, how do we make an individual tiny touchscreen behind every button? Which is what I want to do. You remember the Samsung alias? I do, yeah. Yes, one of those. Let's put an e-ink screen behind it. Let's put an OLED behind every one of these. Let's make a $500 clicks and see if anybody buys it.

It'll be great. That's the full lunacy keyboard thing that I'm very excited for. I'm going to make that. and then I'm a retire move to Mexico. Why start on the iPhone, by the way, as opposed to starting with, you know, galaxy phones or pixel phones or trying to do something that is sort of universally Android? Like, I've been spending some time with the backbone folks, and they've been doing some really interesting work to try to figure out how do we make one thing that works for everybody?

And I can imagine, you know, if you build something that works for everybody, huge increase in the total available market. But also, if you build something for Android, you are more likely to hit the sort of phone nerd people who care about this stuff the way that you and I do. Why not start there? It's really about numbers. You know, honestly, the total addressable market of iPhone users is something like 1.3 billion. And we know that clicks is not for everybody. It's always fun when somebody offers up some wisdom to me on social media. Like, well, you know, this is, no one's going to buy this. I'm like, okay, if one in one thousand people buy it and you're targeting a base of, like, of iPhone users,

like, just from a sheer number perspective, it's, I have preferred Android for a long time. Sure. Partially because of the hardware diversity of that ecosystem, right? So I want to build one eventually. But again, you've got to work in stages, as you well know. You have to start, build a great product, build a healthy business on the back of that, and then you can do other things.

To your other question about, like, why not make a one-size-fits-all one? Definitely considered that. I mean, we got close to announcing that. It'll probably come in the future. There were just too many compromises. It doesn't look as good. You can't get as many cool certifications. when it's not built for a very specific type of iPhone.

Sure. And I hate to keep harping on the aesthetics, but we really wanted to ship something that wasn't this kind of clodgy. I won't name-drop any previous efforts, but like, you know, something that just doesn't look very good, doesn't feel like it was purpose-built for the phone you spent, what, $1,100 on. So let's say, you know, launch goes well.

Everything comes out over the next few months. What's next for clicks? Like, I know I've seen you're going to do, your plan is to do more colors and do drops and that kind of stuff. But I also feel like the thing that I've learned about hardware startups over the years is that getting the first one out the door is borderline impossible. It's a huge amount of work. You have to talk to a bunch of manufacturers and companies that don't know you and don't care about you. But then if you can do the thing, prove you can do it, prove you're serious.

Like the world kind of opens up to you a little bit. And you strike me as somebody who has some pretty wild ideas about where all of this could go. Do you feel like there is tons of runway left in like the footprint of a keyboard? Do you have big ideas about other stuff you want to add in? Like, tease the future a little bit for me. This is not true what I'm about to say. Perfect. But to an extent, you know, I almost wish the beginning portion was as harrowing as you described.

But because we have so many people in the right places, we don't have as many of those problems as we might otherwise. So we've had to think ahead of when I would prefer to think about the, larger conceptual questions, these vision questions of like, at some point you have to ask yourself, well, what are we going to do? Like you just said, are we just going to own buttons on on mobile phones, or are we going to be the kind of company that asks, well, what else can click? Look, I have giant, crazy, dumb ideas in the latter category, and we have a very solid opportunity to make a pretty good business in the former category. But I'll be honest with you, it's not clear which direction we will go, because we still do have to focus on.

getting, you know, we've shipped Founders Edition. That's thousands of units, but it's not the main production run. So we're going to take the time that we have right now to deliver the best possible Gen 1 product to all the people who want to buy them. And then we'll have a better answer for you this time next year. That's a very good and very diplomatic answer. Thank you. And I appreciate that. That is someone who has been in a company for a while. And I'm proud of you for that. Thanks, man. Okay. So I won't ask you to tell me the future. Give me one huge, wild idea that there's absolutely no chance you're ever going to build because it's impossible for one reason or another. You remember there was an old Kia S that ran POMOS. Didn't even have a color screen. We're talking 2001. I think it was a 71 something. And it had a touchscreen, but it had a stowaway detachable numeric keypad that attached via a hinge on the bottom. And if you didn't want to take it all the way off, you could flip it around back so it would get out of the way.

This is a very 2001 device you're describing. I love it. Thank you. That's all I'm here to do is spring back the path. I want to make one of those for the Galaxy Flip 5. or the razor. I want to make a clicks that flips around back and then flips up forward and overlaps the screen and gives you a physical query keyboard that you can then flip away and put around back. It would sell at least 127 units. 119 would probably fail. We will never build it, but I would like to build it. Why not have more mechanisms? That's right. It's just like, what if instead of a hinge, we had several hinges? Exactly. How many parts can you make move? How many points of failure can you introduce into this product? Well, Michael, thank you. This is

incredibly fun. I really appreciate it. This was a great time. Thank you, David. All right, we got to take a break, and we'll be right back with a question from the Vergecast holiday. We're right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flat. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready,

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But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything.

I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas.

Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual.

they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge 1-1, and the email is Vergecast at theverge.com. Send us all your questions, all your thoughts, all your feelings,

and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. First of all, again, thank you to everybody who's calling in about TikTok and the Apple antitrust stuff. We're going to get back to both of those a bunch in the next few weeks. So keep calling. Tell us everything you think we got ready. Tell us everything you think we got wrong. Tell us all of your feelings about all of it.

We want to hear everything. For now, we have a question from Michael. This is Michael from Madison. So my parents are getting older, and I'm looking to record them sharing family stories, so we have them for next generations. And I was looking for advice on what to buy microphone-wise to record my parents talking like Ken Byrne style, like a cute couple. Any advice on what to do would be great.

Thanks. All right, first of all, I believe strongly that everyone should make Ken Burns' documentaries about their family. This is an extremely good idea. Second of all, Andrew, Andrew is here to help me answer this question. Andrew, so much of you on the show today, this makes me very happy. I know, what's up? You have come prepared with what I assume is just a large slew of microphones. This question gets more complicated, the longer I think about it, which is why I'm very glad you're here.

So take us through it. What are your thoughts on this? Okay, so I'm not sure what Michael is actually using to record. So I have a couple options that will give a hybrid of options you can use. Right now, I'm actually using one of the microphones. The Road Wireless Me, Road has like a slew of wireless microphones now. Yeah. That you could just plug into your phone or plug into a camera or into an audio recorder.

They are super easy to use. There's a little square. You just kind of, a big square. It's a big square. You clip onto your lapel. These are the ones that have like the receiver you plug into your phone or computer or whatever, and then the actual mic is what you put on whoever you're talking to, right? And then they automatically connect to each other.

Yeah, exactly. So what I do a lot is I'll plug the receiver into my phone and I'll record a voice memo or with Rhodes recorder app or like take a video and it will take the audio from the road wireless for the audio input. That's a great option because you can, it's very versatile if you want to. make video, if you want to be walking around, if you're like, parents are like cooking dinner, like moving around and all that. Yeah, that's good.

The other one I have is the ATR 2100X USB mic from Audio Technica. What I like about it is it's a USB microphone that's also an XLR microphone. So if you want to plug into your laptop, into your tablet, into your phone, you can use this microphone, but also you can just use it into any mobile audio recorder that has an XLR input or your audio interface or anything. That's a great option. We send these mics to everyone on staff for the Vergecast. Yeah, this is the mic that I tell people, like, if you don't want to spend several hundred dollars on a pro podcasting mic, but you want 90% of the quality, I make people buy this mic. Like, I have recommended this mic to so many people who want to do podcasts.

Yeah, and they're very cheap. Right now I'm looking on B&H, and it's. $49. Oh, wow. Which is... That's a really good deal. Half the price of what they usually are. Yeah, this thing is a good deal at $100. Much like $50.

Okay. I should also mention that the road wireless packs range from $200 to $300, depending what version you want to get. Those are a little more expensive. So here's my question for you on this one, though. I feel like there's a version of this that is like sit with your two parents, right? That's what you want to do. You want to have them sit on a couch and talk to each other.

do you give them each a mic and plug it into a recorder or do you like set the mic on a table and kind of point it between them? Oh, that's a good question. So I actually did this with my friends recently. I interviewed them at their kitchen table. And I had two of the microphones, one for each person. That's the ideal situation. That's like I want the best recording. You can totally just put table and have them talk into both of them, like a little press conference thing.

But since they're so cheap, like it's worth getting. two. Maybe one for you, one for your guest kind of thing, too. Yeah, I mean, a hundred bucks, plug these two things into your computer. They each come with, if memory serves, like, a really crappy, but kind of useful little stand. So you could be kind of all in for $100 on this project and have pretty solid audio. Yeah, that's actually another reason why I recommend it is it comes with a stand. It's not a good stand, but it is a stand. And that comes for something. All right, you said you had one more, right? What's the third option? Okay.

So this is the Senheiser MKE-E-600. Right now it goes for about $350. This is more of a professional microphone. I use this a lot for podcasting field recordings, or maybe I'm over someone's house and I'm interviewing them. I love the crispness of this microphone. Uh-huh. How do you think it sounds?

It sounds really good. I can only see a little bit of it on your screen, but this looks like a kind of proper shotgun. Mike. Yes, exactly. That like this is the kind of thing that you stick on a boom arm and hold over somebody's head on a film shoot. Like that's, this is a much more professional thing than either the other two, it seems. Yeah, this is a great one for like indie filmmakers, even if you want to just put it on top of the camera. But I love it just on a stand, on a desk, pointing right in front of the person's mouth, has just like a very detailed sound. If you want the Ken Burns

documentary style, then this is a great choice. And it's a for a four. among the more professional microphones. Yeah, the microphone world, especially in this realm of these like shotgun boom mics, can get really expensive really fast. But there's definitely, especially for our purposes here, you hit the kind of diminishing returns plateau pretty fast. Like just hearing you now, this sounds really good. I don't know that you would necessarily for like human archival purposes want something

notably better than this. Yeah, I think so. And this is just an XLR microphone, by the way. So you would need either an audio interface or an audio recorder that has an XLR input. Okay. Which is why I offered the others. Wait, I want you to do one test for me here really quickly, though. Yeah.

Just move around a little while you talk. Tell me, sorry, because this is the problem with these shotgun mics, right? Is you have to be like sort of perfectly in front of it, and it sounds amazing. But if you move, sometimes they get weird. Yeah. So I'm talking to the left of it right now, which is off axis a little bit. You're going to hear less of the clarity. I'm going back to the center and I'm going to the right.

Go a little further back. Okay. Usually when they have this shotgun mic, you can go pretty far back because it can catch your voice pretty far away. Yeah, when you go back, you get quieter, but you're still very clear. But as soon as you get off access, like, it starts veering into like, I'm on AirPods kind of vibes that I'm listening to. Yeah. So if you're interviewing two people, you're going to have to have them either switch off between the microphone or you're going to have to boom it like a professional and move it around. Yeah, it's all. I always like you see the field producers for podcasts and whatever, and like half the job is to just sort of shove the microphone in the face of whoever is talking. And it sounds amazing, but it's a process. I'm torn between all of these. Actually, this is a really funny three. As soon as you said the audio technical one, I was like, oh, that's obviously going to be the answer. But I feel like the lapel mic is really useful for somebody who is not used to talking into a mic in a way that it's just like it just sort of goes with your body for somebody who's like moving around and.

isn't always focused on mic technique, having it just sort of live close to your mouth is always really useful. Then the audio technical one is kind of a useful middle ground for not a lot of money. And then this one is clearly the best sounding. Like it's actually notably better sounding than either of the other two, which I didn't really expect to be the case. Yeah. And you can keep going up. You can go to $10,000 if you watch you to get the best microphone. But really, like, these ones are like very flexible in different environments.

And that's why I chose these. Awesome. Well, Michael, I hope that helps. please let us know which one you decide, and we would love to hear the documentary when it's done. Andrew, thank you as always. That was awesome. No problem.

All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, including that awesome video from our video team about noise cancellation, all this stuff about clicks. We'll put it all in the show notes on theverge.com, but, you know, read theverge.com.

It's an oon-ozy time. There's a lot going on. Check it out. And, as always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions or other keyboards you want to see brought back to life. You can always email us Vergecast to the verge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. We want to hear everything from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore.

The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neel I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about probably more antitrust stuff, more TikTok stuff, and everything else going on in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.