Yeah, sadly it'd cost about $100 to get a book per month... Not quite competitive with Audible yet, but give it a year perhaps, or a few iterations of the open source models... (fixed the link)
Elevenlabs is a lot closer to compelling audiobook narration (needs a better way to deal with multiple characters in a story without manual use of multiple voices): https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa... (an H.G.Wells example I just asked it to read).
Have another look at that internals picture (which is a render so take it with a grain of salt), they appear to be using an extremely unconventional arrangement of a rigid cone driven by two linear motors mounted at 45 degree angles to the driver axis.
A rigid cone is challenging but a goal in many high-priced designs (less so for headphones but definitely in speaker drivers with say carbon fibre drivers).
Dual actuators mounted like that could be interesting for spatial audio and may also be used to overcome some of the challenges with suspending rigid driver cones.
In other words it should be interesting to see the reviews...
Good pedestrian navigation (which needs pedestrian road/pathway networks that haven't been built to the same extent as they have for roads, though in some countries like Japan they are much better) doesn't need constant interaction.
You'd just be wearing your regular headset and you'd occasionally hear "at the next intersection, take the traffic light on your left, cross the road and continue down xxx street"
If there was a big demand for pedestrian navigation (walking around an unfamiliar city is not a frequent activity for most people) we would already have better solutions, such as good voice navigation, which would arguably be better than can be done on the low-res Google glass display.
Receiving messages and notifications is a very frequent occurrence for most people these days. Personally I suspect I'd find the watch notification preferable to one that appears in my peripheral vision (disrupting attention) for that use case.
I find that very unlikely. Pedestrian navigation isn't exactly a major use case for most people and is pretty well covered by phones and smartwatches already.
Could have been useful for food delivery drivers (cyclists), but then we're right back into specialist markets.
I would argue that with the extremely low cost of PCB manufacturing (and... if you have access to it... assembly) it's easier now to just lay out a PCB and get it made. The trick is to build up a library of circuit "modules" (like... power supply section, battery charging, video output, etc) that get copy-pasted together.
Of course there's the delay in waiting for the PCBs, which could be frustrating for a hobby project (I was lucky enough to live in SZ for a while where getting PCBs back 2 days after ordering is standard). But parallelising projects can be an effective way of dealing with that, and the variety on working on different things (and the joy of getting a PCB in the mail) can help to mitigate that.
We might only be a few papers away from a good open source Elevenlabs competitor.