You don’t have to stuff
your ear with cotton anymore or sleep on the couch, or even catch a quick
snooze on your work desk, because Bose has just the thing for you that’ll help
you grab a good night’s sleep. Introducing the Bose Sleepbuds, the smart
earplugs filters sleep disturbing sounds like snoring, barking dogs, amorous
neighbors, and road traffic through isolating eartips and soothing sounds tuned
to mask the noise. The audio company chose to introduce them through an
Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, rather than going through the usual route to
launch the product commercially, to get real feedback from the users to further
improve it.
The smart earplugs use masking sounds that are
stored locally on the Sleepbuds, as streaming from a smartphone would affect
battery life too severely, Bose says on its Indiegogo page. If you think that
these look familiar, it is because the noise filtering earplugs were introduced
by a company called Hush, a San Diego-based startup which demonstrated it at
the CES technology trade show in early 2016. It turns out that Hush was acquired
by Bose and developed the product for itself.
In just one day after the 25-day
campaign launched, Sleepbuds have sold out at all price tiers, from US$ 150 to US$ 185, on its crowdfunding campaign. At the time of writing, the campaign had
earned US$ 443,910 with investment from 2930 backers. It will retail for US$ 250 once
it is made available to the public in 2018.
