April 2026

Tomorrow Happening Today
Plus Fraunhofer Institute (IIS) for immersive sound upHear technology.
Editorial By J. Martins

  What a start to the year this has been! 2026 is proving to be one of the most exciting times in memory for everyone involved in technology in general, and I don't recall having so many different fronts of innovation in audio to keep us busy as we've had recently. To begin, we had a busy time with three totally different trade shows, starting with CES in Las Vegas, NV, quickly followed by the NAMM Show in Anaheim, CA, and Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, the largest in history, with a record number of exhibitors and attendees. While CES is focused on consumer electronics and the wider consumer technology space, NAMM offered a fascinating perspective on the practical use of technology by studios, musicians, and live production companies. And, ISE was completely focused on commercial installation systems and residential integration, showing a different side of professional audio. Yet, there was a clear thread of common technology trends and innovation across all these trade shows.

One is the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) for the audio industry, with audio at the core of so many application segments, and audio helping bridge AI with the physical world through sensors, transducers, human interfaces, and interactions. And at the core, we have voice and language. And I truly believe that language is the largest market opportunity for the audio industry. Because people speak—and think—in hundreds of languages, and AI technologies are finally at a state to assist in bridging those "islands" that today separate people, cultures, and much of our understanding of the world. AI-based language support and translation is the most effective foundation to augment our human abilities.

And another exciting trend is the return of voice recognition and natural language interactions. Unfortunately, at far too many events, I see this associated with "Agentic AI," referring to advanced artificial intelligence systems designed for autonomy, reasoning over context using large language models (LLMs), some of which are exactly the type of things we don't want AI for and prefer human interaction. Meanwhile, "voice assistants" such as Siri, Alexa, and others, are getting "autonomous," now integrating advanced LLMs, while "services" such as ChatGPT and Claude are adding voice capabilities. We should call these simply Voice AI.

That's where opportunities are for audio companies, with Voice AI assistants requiring wake words, voice activity detection, natural language understanding (NLU), preferably optimized on lightweight machine learning (ML) models that can be embedded in product designs for rapid response and improved privacy.

During all the shows I attended, I saw countless examples of new products and applications relying on Voice AI, and that means great opportunities for audio systems involving everything from microphones and audio front-ends as discussed in this issue to improved audio electronics and new types of more efficient transducers.

That's why the Smart Speaker is back. Now even better and more useful, at the heart of connected homes and streaming entertainment to the whole house. And with the ability to adapt to any multichannel configuration in any type of room.

One of the most exciting concepts now being explored is "flexible rendering." The concept is being developed by the Fraunhofer Institute (IIS) for immersive sound experiences with its upHear technology. We saw this implemented by StreamUnlimited Engineering, which is developing fully wireless flexible rendering solutions, where speakers connected over Wi-Fi and ultra-wideband (UWB) are aware of each other and the room in which they are located. And there is Dolby Atmos FlexConnect, a new simpler, more flexible way to generate Dolby Atmos experiences with music or movies, where speakers can be placed flexibly, added, or removed, and the renderer adapting accordingly. It's early days, but the possibilities are truly exciting and immediately recognized by consumers.

However, it's impossible to mention even a small sample of what we've seen here. The audioXpress.com website is the best way for us to share all the key things happening in the audio industry. Not surprisingly, the number of manufacturers reaching out daily to audioXpress has been on the rise and many confirm how they value the information resource that is provided by our website (where a large number of our full magazine articles are also available).

J. Martins
Editor-in-Chief

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