Conversational AI hardware and wearables cover earbuds, headsets, and dedicated voice devices that put speech interfaces and lightweight agents at the user’s ear. These devices blend categories—Conversation Intelligence, Voice Synthesis & Transcription, and Text‑to‑Speech—so users can get live transcription, high‑quality synthesized responses, call handling and contextual assistance without pulling out a phone. Key building blocks include production‑grade TTS and voice cloning (e.g., ElevenLabs), on‑device offline transcription and prompt generation for privacy‑sensitive workflows (e.g., Bocca), real‑time noise cancellation and meeting transcription (e.g., Krisp), APIs/SDKs that capture and surface meeting metadata (e.g., Recall.ai), and specialized voice agents for phone handling and service providers (e.g., Simple Phones, Vocea). Why it matters now: improvements in model efficiency, streaming ASR/ TTS, and noise‑robust audio processing have made low‑latency, usable voice agents feasible on constrained hardware. Enterprises are adopting audio capture and synthesis for hybrid work, customer service, and field operations, while privacy expectations and regulation push more processing onto devices or into clearly governed cloud workflows. Practical considerations for developers and buyers include latency and battery tradeoffs, network fallbacks and hybrid edge/cloud architectures, voice identity and consent, integration with conferencing/CRM systems, and robustness to real‑world noise. For comparison and selection, evaluate device OS and SDK support, on‑device model capabilities, TTS fidelity and voice‑cloning controls, transcription accuracy in noisy environments, and integrations for meeting capture and telephony. The space is evolving toward modular voice agents that balance responsiveness, privacy, and integration with enterprise workflows.