Bose CES 2023 Keynote: Our Vision, Brand, and What's Next | Bose Automotive

Thank you John.

Happy to. I am always glad to talk about the Bose long-range Vision. We've done a lot of work on it and really wanted to focus on what's great about Bose. The vision really has four components, all centered around the customer. We're really focused on how we create the best experiences for consumers, so we put them right at the center of the vision. First, not surprisingly, is innovation. We're a technology company, we've always been an innovation company, and that hasn't changed. We've focused our research on three core areas we call our technology franchises. The first is noise removal—before you can have any great audio experience, you want to remove unwanted noise, and Bose has been known for that for many years. We think there's tremendous upside and more research to be done there. The second is a great immersive, lifelike audio experience, just like the artist intended you to hear it, best presented on a low noise floor. So noise removal first, build great audio on top. The third franchise, which is newer and more nuanced, is about hearing what you want. There are many situations where there are sounds you do want to hear, you just don't want to hear all of them. Using machine learning and AI, how do we draw out the best sounds and take away the ones that are most irritating or distracting? The great thing about all three franchises is that they're applicable everywhere—headphones, Bluetooth speakers, or automotive.

That leads into the second component of our vision: a focus on consumer audio. Our OEM partners really depend on us for that. We've got laser focus on consumer audio in three spaces: the home, where we're creating a dynamic experience in your living environment; your car, where we want to make sure that's an absolutely stellar experience; and on the go—our term for any wearable product that takes you between the home, the car, and any other destination. Those three areas speak to our history but also our future, and we want to focus on having the best products in each of those consumer audio domains because that's what our OEM partners and consumers count on us for.

The third piece of the vision is partnerships. We've been in the partnership business for over 40 years with our Automotive OEM partners. But we think there's a lot of opportunity for a new form of partnership in two dimensions. One is partnering for technology we can bring into our products to make them better—being more open to other technology we can bring to the car, home, or on the go. The second is taking our great technology and putting it into other people's products. An early example is the hearing aid we partnered on with Lexie Hearing, where we've taken our technology and helped bring it to a hearing aid they're bringing to market. There are a couple of other keynote segments where we've talked about partnerships in automotive, both on the experience creation side and the delivery side, so definitely make sure you tune into those.

And then the final piece of the long-range vision is the brand. I'm going to let Jim talk about that, but really the brand is about re-embracing sound as our superpower at Bose—recognizing that is what is great and distinctive and special about us, and bringing that to the market in new and exciting ways that people haven't seen from Bose, or at least not for a very long time.

Absolutely. This idea of Better Together—how do we make our products and experiences better when you put them together—is really central to our long-range vision. It's probably a place we haven't focused on as much in the past, but we're really starting to look at it today. One of the things driving that is how ubiquitous wearables are. For every family car, there's a wearable on every person. The idea of that wearable stuck in your ear isn't helpful in an automotive context because of safety, but when you can transition to an open-ear environment—we've been investing for years in open-ear audio technology and it's really starting to come to market now—it opens up a lot of possibilities. You could use near-field audio to augment the installed audio system that's already tremendous, completely transforming that experience. It could be around safety and navigation prompts which only the driver needs to hear. It could be about making your life more seamless as you transition from on the go to in your car and back. We think there are a lot of really exciting possibilities here, and we're only starting to scratch the surface. That goes back to the technology franchises—the ability to hear what you want, immersive audio, removal of noise. We can do that in different ways involving wearables or cars or some combination.

Jim summarized it well. It's an exciting time to be at Bose, and I think an exciting time to partner with Bose.