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Apple AirPods Poised to Get Sleep Tracking, Gesture Controls at WWDC 2025

AirPods will soon track your sleep and help remotely control your iPhone's camera

Siddhartha Samaddar profile picture
by Siddhartha Samaddar

Published 1 day ago

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Apple AirPods 4 lying on a blue background

Image Credit: Alexey87/ Shutterstock

Summary

  • Apple reportedly plans to add exciting new features to its AirPods lineup at WWDC 2025.
  • Features like sleep detection will automatically pause audio playback when the user dozes off.
  • A new studio-grade mic mode and new head gestures are also speculated to reach AirPods.

With Apple's WWDC 2025 devcon right around the corner, leaks suggest that the AirPods will receive a major feature upgrade. They will go beyond incremental upgrades to audio quality and could make your AirPods a smart device beyond audio.

According to 9to5Mac, five new AirPods features are on the horizon. They are sleep detection, camera controls, new head gestures, enhanced microphone capabilities, and improved device pairing.

Sleep detection is the most interesting of the lot and something we all might use once it rolls out. Often, we find ourselves dozing off to sleep while listening to podcasts or playlists. The report rightfully notes that people use sleep timers to get past this, but a lot of apps don't support it. For example, while Spotify and YouTube Music do support sleep timers, Amazon Music doesn't. 

If implemented, the sleep detection feature would allow AirPods to intelligently recognise when a user falls asleep and automatically pause audio playback, eliminating the need for manual sleep timers. This capability is currently available on the Apple Watch. So, it would be interesting to see how well the sleep detection feature works on the AirPods. 

The next major addition would be camera control. As the name suggests, this feature would let users remotely control their iPhone's camera shutter directly from their AirPods. By pinching the AirPod stem, users would be able to capture photos or initiate/pause video recordings. This functionality aligns with Apple's ongoing efforts to create a seamless, hands-free experience across its devices.

Using touch controls on Apple AirPods
Image Credit: Framesira/ Shutterstock
Using touch controls on Apple AirPods
Image Credit: Framesira/ Shutterstock

Now, although camera control will utilise the AirPod's stem, new head gestures will streamline further interaction with the earbuds. Last year, Apple introduced the vertical and horizontal nod gesture with the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2 to decline or accept calls.

Now, as per the report, Apple plans to introduce a "Conversation Awareness" volume gesture. Right now, you can use this feature by pressing and holding or swiping up on the AirPods stem.

On the audio front, microphone capabilities are poised to get an upgrade. The AirPods are rumoured to introduce "studio quality" mic mode. Building on last year's Audio Mix feature on the iPhone 16 lineup, this also promises intelligent background noise separation using machine learning. This upgrade could make the AirPods a viable tool for high-fidelity audio capture in various environments, especially in the content creator economy.

Finally, Apple is said to be working on an enhanced pairing experience. The company will address the common friction point of pairing-related issues in certain scenarios, such as classrooms where multiple students use the same device.

Now, it remains unclear whether the new features will reach all AirPods models or only the latest ones. That said, Apple has yet to announce the above-mentioned features, so take this report with a pinch of salt. We will get official information soon as the WWDC 2025 keynote kicks off on June 09, 2025.

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Source

9to5Mac
Siddhartha Samaddar profile picture
Siddhartha Samaddar

Tech News Writer

Expertise :

Siddhartha is a tech writer with 2.5 years of experience, focused on making tech easy to understand for everyone. He enjoys breaking down complex ideas into simple, helpful bite-sized content. Outside of work, he loves reading books and often finds himself daydreaming about the dream gaming setup he hopes to build someday.

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