By Jonathan Chien, VP and GM of the Audio Business Unit, xMEMS
In conversations with AI-glasses manufacturers, I’ve noticed a pattern. Teams often begin by talking about AI models, displays, cameras, processors, or battery life. But eventually the conversation arrives at the same place: physical constraints.
Where do we conceal the electronics? How do we optimize weight distribution for a stable three-point fit? And how do we deliver all of this in a form comfortable enough to wear all-day?
What has surprised me most over the past year is how frequently the discussions around audio features have moved to a system-design discussion. A few years ago, conversations around speakers focused primarily on sound quality. Today, the discussion is driven by industrial design and focuses on space, weight, and thermal limits. That’s a significant shift, and it’s one of the reasons I believe audio is becoming increasingly strategic in AI wearables.
The technology industry has spent the last two decades searching for the next major computing platform. Smartphones transformed how we access information on the go. Wireless earbuds made personal audio accessible. Today, AI glasses are emerging as the next step in that evolution, bringing intelligence closer to the user than ever before.
What makes AI glasses fundamentally different from previous wearables is that they fluidly engage both sight and sound without interrupting the user. By placing AI directly into the user’s view and hearing, AI glasses create a far more natural human-machine interface. As a result, voice becomes the primary mode of interaction. Rather than reaching for a smartphone, tapping through menus, or switching between devices, users simply ask questions, receive directions, hear translations, access real-time information, and engage with AI through effortless conversation.
For AI glasses to become an everyday product, they must be comfortable, stylish, and useful. The primary drivers for comfort and style are size and weight. Usefulness is driven by components, performance, and battery life. Traditionally, these needs are directly opposed. Every design decision involves tradeoffs between battery capacity, sensors, cameras, processing power, thermal management, and audio performance.
One customer described AI-glasses design as a game of impossible tradeoffs: “Every cubic millimeter inside the frame is already spoken for.” Batteries, cameras, sensors, processors, and speakers are all competing for space in a product users expect to be lightweight and comfortable. In that environment, recovering even a few cubic millimeters can have an outsized impact on the overall design.
Audio sits in the middle of many of those tradeoffs. Critical to a voice interface, the speakers must deliver clear, intelligible sound, preserve privacy, and remain unobtrusive within an already crowded frame. At the same time, they compete for the same limited space, weight, and power budget as other critical components.
The industry has been optimizing traditional voice-coil speakers for over a century, but AI glasses have exposed their practical limits. Achieving higher sound pressure levels requires disproportionately more space. As a result, designers are frequently forced to make tradeoffs in temple thickness, frame styling, and long-term comfort to accommodate the speaker. The industry doesn’t simply need a smaller speaker. It needs a radically more space-efficient approach to audio.
That’s what makes the transition to MEMS speakers so important. Rather than continuing incremental improvements to traditional voice-coil architectures, MEMS speakers leverage the advantages of semiconductor manufacturing, bringing greater precision, consistency, scalability, and reliability to wearable audio.
At xMEMS, PulseAir speakers were developed to address the broader challenge of delivering high-quality audio while consuming as little space and weight as possible. While AI glasses highlight these constraints more clearly than perhaps any other category today, the same design pressures exist across open-ear earbuds, smart headsets, hearables, and future AI-powered wearable devices.
PulseAir’s architecture delivers open-ear audio while dramatically reducing the size and weight associated with conventional speakers. A fundamentally different architecture, the objective isn’t merely to improve audio performance. It’s to give product designers freedom.
Ultimately, the goal is not simply to build smarter devices. It is to make that intelligence feel natural and effortless, and the companies that succeed will be the ones that seamlessly embed that utility into products people genuinely enjoy wearing every day. From my perspective, audio will play a much larger role in future technologies than many people realize. If voice becomes the primary interface for AI, then the technologies that deliver that experience become foundational to the entire product. AI wearables will not be defined solely by smarter algorithms; it will be shaped by the hardware innovations that allow those algorithms to disappear into products people genuinely enjoy wearing.
That’s the promise of MEMS speaker: not just better sound, but greater freedom to design the next generation of AI wearables.
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