90% of the features in your daily life started as something no one asked for or needed. I remember people saying this about touch screens.

I don’t care about Spatial Audio for phone calls, but for songs and podcasts it’s AMAZING. It’s a gimmick, sure, but it’s really fucking neat.

We're ^calling^ about ~your~ cars ^extended^ ^warranty^

Kitboga SURROUND SOUND? Sign me up

It's easier to redirect attention than to completely obscure something.

"I'M JUST STRUGGLING TO OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER! PAY NO MIND TO MY SOUNDS OF DISTRESS!" (Horrible farting sounds ensue)

Foolproof.

It's not, I assure you. It uses psychoacoustic properties of audio to simulate actual surround sound. I've been using it in gaming for years. You can literally hear when an enemy is behind you vs in front of you, and anywhere in the 360° around you. You can easily pinpoint their location in your head.

Pixel Buds Pro have this same kind of programming and you can enable it when watching surround sound content on your phone. You can even have it play regular audio but make it sound like it's coming from the direction of the phone. When you turn your head, the audio follows the phone and it sounds like the audio is coming from the phone in 3D, not just panned L or R in stereo. (I haven't played with this much, and I hope I'm not misremembering that last part which iPhone also has.)

Here's a computer generated example using these techniques. Headphones are required! Listen to this with ordinary headphones with no additional spatial processing enabled.

To my ears, it sounds like the 3 channels of the source audio are little spheres rotating around the top of my head like a halo. The music sounds distinctly different when it's behind me or in front of me. The distance away from my head is not far, though.

https://youtu.be/LpMsqFc7-Z4

A technique like this will never be perfect, and this is not the best example I've heard. The best would be using my Logitech gaming headset in a game. It's not perfect because everyone's ears are shaped differently, and your brain learns the microtonal differences which your specific ears cause as sound echo's around your outer ear and ear canal. This might be why I hear these music examples as above my head while others might hear it revolve directly around their ears or perhaps a little lower than their ears.

I enjoy how ignorant people who don't understand a technology dismiss is with snark and get upvoted by others. Wait, what's the opposite of enjoy?

It's like how religious fundies with little education make fun of our best scientific theories with arguments that boil down to "I'm ignorant, so I don't believe this". Congratulations on being on the same level.

Progress mate. We are firmly in diminishing returns territory.

Spatial audio is more like smart stereo. It's all the 3+ speaker system methods of positional audio that are stupid.

If only they had developed some kind of companion technology that connected to the phone and directed separate audio channels to each of your ears. Eh, such a specialized device could never gain widespread adoption if stereo phone calls were the only practical use case.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people making calls are still going to have only one speaker, so it'll still get downmixed to mono. Even if your phone has two, and you're not holding it next to one ear, they're still going to be so close together as to effectively be one point source.

No, lots of (probably most) phones and other devices has stereo speakers.

Either way headphones are most often used for this (you know like the thumbnail)

Incorrect. This will better train LLMs since they can detect distinct speakers/sounds more easily and thus applying the proper metadata tags and profile information at a more accurate clip.

All so they can deliver more ads!

Not everything that will be useful has an immediately obvious benefit.

At least in the United States, when you call somebody on the same carrier as you, you get that HD quality thing, and that improves the call quality a bunch versus the standard 8KB phone call. However, even still, when you call somebody on another carrier, you generally don't get that high quality call. So it would be nice to get those high quality calls between carriers for everybody before moving on.

Lol yeah everyone shitting on stereo is shooting in the wrong direction - companies suck, stereo or surround sound doesn't. Not saying it's a super high priority for me, but another channel of audio isn't going to use much bandwidth, we already listen to streaming music in stereo all the time.