14 DAY TRIAL // We live in a noisy world and sometimes the things we want to hear elude us, being covered up by the noise attacking our senses from every direction.
Imagine you're having lunch in a busy, crowded restaurant and you're trying your best to hear what your friend who just got back from a trip to Italy is saying, but the conversation is going nowhere.
What if you could put all the restaurant white noise behind you and focus on your friend? Well, it turns out you can actually do that.
Introducing the Soundhawk Scoop – a small device being touted as a smart listening system that is capable of enhancing the sounds you pick up using a smartphone app that can identify certain sounds.
The device is almost half the size of a Bluetooth device and weighs no more than an earring, so it will fit right into your ear.
Scoop is the love child of former hardware and software engineers at Palm, Apple and Amazon, who have devoted the last two years to bringing this project to life.
The little ear-friendly device comes bundled with two microphones and one button. It can connect to either your iPhone or Android via Bluetooth 2.1 and can achieve tasks such as receiving phone calls or calling up Siri.
But such features have long ceased to amaze us, right? Anyway, the really interesting part comes when users fire up the corresponding mobile app that lets you choose what you want to hear.
Soundhawk manages to achieve this incredible feat by separating audio in four categories: indoors, outdoors, dining and driving.
For example, if you pick out dining mode, the device will pull out and highlight sounds coming from the people sitting further away from you, like your dining buddies.
These pre-sets can be manually altered, so you can choose to increase or decrease the intensity of the sound, bass level, pitch or frequency by dragging your finger up/down or left/right, until you find the sound level that best suits you.
When noise levels go through the roof, there’s also the possibility of using the microphone accessory piece that will work in concert with the ear piece in order to pick up the voices of the people near you.
The little mic might come in handy if you want to watch late night TV and you don’t want to disturb those around you. Placing the mic next to the TV’s speakers will deliver an amplified sound experience directly to your ear.
The Scoop and its wireless mic can both be charged via a dedicated charging case, which is also used to safeguard the $279 / €204 worth of cargo.
Scoop is currently up for pre-order for the price mentioned above, but when it truly arrives on the market, it will sell for $299 / €219.