Timekettle's new translation earbuds cost $299, and the AI features that make them worth owning cost $14.99 a month on top.
The W4 Plus AI Interpreter Earbuds were shown at IFA 2026 in Berlin and go on sale September 6 through Timekettle's own site and Amazon, according to Digital Trends, which reported the launch. There is a second option at $379, which buys the same hardware with every feature already unlocked and no monthly bill.
Eighty dollars separates those two prices, and a $14.99 subscription clears eighty dollars in under six months.
The software doing the work is Babel OS 3.0. It handles 52 languages and 106 accents while the buds are online, falls back to 13 language pairs when they are not, and switches between the two on its own depending on the connection. Offline coverage is what matters most to anyone using these where they were meant to be used, which is abroad, on somebody else's mobile network. 13 pairs is a much smaller product than 52 languages.
For a face-to-face conversation, you and the other person each wear one earbud, and it translates in both directions while you talk. A Listen and Play mode covers conferences and guided tours, saving and transcribing what it hears along the way. Phone and video calls are interpreted inside Zoom, WhatsApp and Telegram, with nothing for the person on the other end to install. Subtitles on YouTube and Netflix are handled in step with the video. The first of those modes asks you to hand a stranger one of your earbuds and then take it back.
Past the translating, you can pick an industry profile such as tech, manufacturing or biotech to sharpen accuracy in specialized conversations, and a conversation memory keeps the terminology consistent across a long talk. AI Live Summary turns a saved conversation into notes. An improved VoiceFocus system, which is the microphone processing that isolates a speaking voice from a room, picks up quiet voices 32 to 47 percent better than the original W4. That last figure is the only hardware improvement Timekettle put a number on.
Our AirPods roadmap already carries a reported claim, from Bloomberg, that Apple is building live translation into AirPods for in-person conversations. Apple has announced nothing. The W4 Plus goes on sale three days before Apple's September 9 event, at a price that buys a pair of AirPods Pro and change.
A subscription is also a bet that the software keeps getting better, and it is the buyer carrying that bet rather than the company. Timekettle has an answer for anyone unwilling to make it, and the answer costs eighty dollars once.
The speaking coach that drills you on real conversations works in English, Chinese and Spanish. The buds handle 52.