Sunny Ray talks with Gary Spittle, founder of Sonical, about turning earbuds into a genuine computing platform. Gary traces his path through DSP work at Symbian and CSR during Bluetooth's early days, the Qualcomm acquisition and the aptX deal, and stints at Dolby and Knowles, explaining how each role shaped his thinking about intellectual property, software stacks, and combining many technologies inside one device. He describes Sonical's mission to build a hearing computer powered by Cosmos OS, letting users download applications for spatial audio, noise reduction, or tinnitus relief instead of settling for one fixed function. Gary shares the personal motivation behind the company, his own tinnitus, and how that pushed him to search for technology that simply did not exist in a buyable device. They discuss the challenges of building custom 22 nanometer silicon through the Silicon Catalyst incubator, growing a third party developer community larger than his Bluetooth chip days, and convincing device makers to abandon familiar Bluetooth chips for a full computing platform. Gary also covers Sonical's partnership with Sony on the Remora device and what the next twelve months hold as the company pushes toward serving people with profound hearing needs.
Gary Spittle explains how Sonical turns earbuds into an app powered hearing computer, born from his own tinnitus and decades in audio engineering.
What is Sonical building, and why should listeners care?
At Sonical we're building a platform that lets people wear a computer in their ears. That means they can access applications that enhance their hearing throughout the day, and most importantly, they decide what it does, not the product maker. It's the same idea as laptops, phones, cars, and TVs, just brought to your ears.
What technical problem from your early career have you never stopped thinking about?
It's how you bring lots of different technologies together into one device. That challenge goes back to my very first job in college, and it followed me through every company since. Computers solve this by letting you load whatever applications you want, with no real limits. The challenge for us was doing that inside a tiny embedded system, so you build an operating system and open it up for everyone to write apps.
When did you realize the earbud was the most worn computer, not just an accessory?
We saw firsthand how many were being sold when we made Bluetooth chips, then Apple's AirPods grew the market even further, but the world became saturated. These devices are basic, mostly a wireless link to your phone. I have tinnitus myself, and when I looked for something to help, the technology existed among researchers but wasn't in any product I could buy, so we decided to build that ourselves.
Why does an app store for your ear only work if a neutral layer builds it underneath?
It's similar to how Android works on phones. If every developer had to understand a phone's chips directly, basic apps would take years to build. An operating system shrinks that development time and removes the decision from the product maker, so phone makers do not decide what you install, you do. That common ground only exists when the complexity underneath is abstracted away, and that is what our operating system does for hearing devices.
What does it actually take to get from a design decision to real silicon at 22 nanometers?
It's really tough. You're looking for a sweet spot on the processing geometry, not too expensive, not so advanced that there is a huge learning curve, but small enough to fit inside someone's ear. We took guidance from chip experts who pointed us to 22 nanometers, and we were fortunate to join an incubator called Silicon Catalyst, which gave us access to the tools, experts, and manufacturing we needed to build test silicon quickly.
Can you explain Cosmos OS to someone who has never thought about what runs inside a headphone?
Cosmos is our proprietary software, similar to Windows on a laptop or Android on a phone, except those systems are screen first. Ours splits into two parts, one that runs on your phone as the interface, and one that runs on the embedded device itself, like a hearing aid, headphone, or smart glasses. Applications run locally on the device so you get almost imperceptible latency, which matters for real time hearing and audio processing.
What has to happen in the next 12 months for Sonical to be where you want it to be?
We're already ahead on the developer community side, it grew faster than we expected. Now we need to get more products out there, working closely with Sony to build more units and attach the technology to existing products. Our first customers will not just be people who want Spotify on the tube, they will be people with profound needs we can finally serve, and that is where we will learn the most.
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