Anker made its own chip to bring AI to all its products

Another +1 for Anker kit - ime it just works, is reasonably priced, and seems to last (I'm still using a 10 year old usb battery of theirs).

They make a lot of not-top-tier products. The products are usually quite good, but not the best. And they're often the best value.

(Very happy with my $60 Anker earbuds).

Anker is a powerhouse and they've grown huge.

Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too.

But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame.

They're killing it.

They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.

> Traditional call noise canceling relies on those small onboard neural networks and can have difficulty isolating your voice in very noisy environments, which results in ambient noise leaking through or voices getting highly compressed, making it difficult to hear. Anker says the larger neural network available on the Thus chip, plus eight MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) microphones and two bone conduction sensors to focus in on your voice, in its yet-to-be-announced earbuds will have significantly cleaner call audio, regardless of the environment.

Anyone who likes good noise cancellation, which is a lot of people.

Back in the day we just called it ML. But now you have to stop for a minute to read and determine what they’re talking about, because “AI” is primarily a marketing term.

Early in the article it explains that these devices already had small neural nets on board. The advancement is that they can now put larger neural nets on board.

The best noise cancellation has to be adaptive. Neural nets help this work well. If making the product work well is "shoving it down your throat" then I don't know what to say.

The public presumably didn't hate the products before this chip and before knowing they had some form of AI on board.

> Anyway, time to find another peripherals vendor.

Why? You don't even understand what the AI functionality is for or the fact that it already existed. You just get triggered by reading articles like this?

According to the article, it's used for noise cancelling and calling that can better isolate voice from background noise. It's not an AI assistant or an LLM. These are totally different and the public's feelings on LLMs do not apply to their feelings on active noise cancelling.

> Who asked for AI on hubs and chargers?

USB-C and hdmi cable issues are right up there as causes of frustration for me. But me day the external minute works, next it doesn’t.

Having cables fail in new and unexpected ways with AI sounds amazing.

They're not putting them on hubs and chargers, Anker make more than that. In the article it says that they're being used first in earbuds.

AI is polarizing.

The rest of the world outside of the US and Europe loves AI. China is embracing it fully.

Why is our Western media making the public hate it so much? It's almost as if it's a top down edict from all the news giants to constantly dump on AI and make it sound like it'll kill you.

If we maintain this view, we're going to get steamrolled. And we'll have deserved it.

VCs