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If you could put every possible feature into an around-the-neck headphones unit, what capabilities would it have? The OV Pro from OV Loop probably has 'em all, with its ambient mode, active noise cancelling, support for Siri and Google Assistant and support for Amazon Alexa. All in the darn headphones! But does that make for an overly complicated device?
Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ checks out the OV Pro Headphones and finds that there's lots to like, including its excellent sound. But there are some issues to know about too...
Learn more at https://www.OvLoop.com/
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Headphones with built-in Amazon Alexa support
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Let's check them out. Dave Taylor here, and I'm looking at these
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These are the OV Pro headphones, and they have some pretty nifty tricks up their sleeves
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Most importantly, it actually interfaces with a variety of different voice systems on your phone
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independent of what kind of phone you have. So a lot of headphones give you the ability to talk
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to Siri or Google Assistant, but these actually can work with Alexa too once you set it all up on your phone
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which is a little bit tricky but doable. So they also have something called OV Chat. And OV Chat
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we'll get back to it later. It's sort of this interesting idea they have. So as I said, these are the OV Pros and their big schick
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as they say, is they're the voice first hearable assistant. So that means that
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Like I said, it's going to work with as if you are carrying around a little echo dot or something
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Now, it turns out that there's also some other things going on here that make these really nice sounding
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And one of which is they have what they call ambient mode, which is a little confusing because you want to turn it off to be able to actually have it sound good
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And then there's noise cancellations. So you have all these different features, get everything all set up properly, and these have really rock and sound
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I was very impressed. Now, ambient is actually an interesting idea because there's microphones on the end of these
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and it's one of these where it goes around your neck, and then you just put the earbuds in your ears
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and the microphones actually can go live or hot in ambient mode so you can chat with people around you
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In practice, it just means that all of a sudden you have a lot of background noise
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It's very disconcerting. I'm not sure I'll ever use it, but it's an interesting idea
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It's not that hard to say, oh, excuse me. me you know and put them back in when you're done if you're on a phone call there's a mute
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feature which is nice and battery life let's talk about that for a minute 14 hours so these
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last a nice long time as you hope with this sort of design because there's lots of space for
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battery you know and there's still nonetheless super light if I put them around my neck honestly
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I don't even know I have them on super comfortable and watch videos with them if you want to watch
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Netflix or YouTube videos or something, I found basically zero lag, which is important, because
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if you have some Bluetooth headphones that actually have significant lag, it's really annoying
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So let's go through the box super quick and then I'll come back and tell you a little bit more
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about how it all sounds and everything. So very nice packaging. You open it up and the packages you can see is very much designed for these particular headphones And then in this little box you find a couple of interesting wires actually
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So one of which, let's just put it this way so you can still see it
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So the wires that come with the product include, let's see, there's a charging wire and it uses USBC
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So props to them for moving into the future with USBC instead of micro USB
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I like that. And it's an interesting USBC cable because it's a 90 degree angle on it
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And I haven't seen a USBC like that before. So kind of the cable's useful by itself
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But you obviously need to have something to plug it into. So probably a wall charger
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Where this also gets interesting is that same USBC connection has a 3.5 millimeter jack on the other end of this wire
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And this means you can use these as wired headphones if you want
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So if you don't like Bluetooth or if you're on an airplane or something and you just don't want to risk it, then this solves that problem
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In addition, as with all these devices, it comes with multiple size ear tips
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Please take the time to find the correct ones. It does make a difference. In fact, I've seen a couple other people have reviewed these and said that there's no base
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My suspicion is that they didn't try the right size ear tips for their ears
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So let's go and let me tell you about the interface, the sort of user experience
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it because it's a little clumsy, I have to say, because there are buttons on the end of both
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of these that have different functions. There are buttons along the top, which is the standard
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volume up, volume down, hold it down to get track forward, track back, and then the middle
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button is power or pause play, right? So all that is reasonable. But then on the left ear
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there's nothing. But on the right ear, there's a button on the top, and that gives you yet more
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controls. So it's like overloaded with controls, which befits the fact that it has a lot going on
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There's a lot of complexity here. In fact, I didn't realize it had active noise cancellation
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until I was messing around with double pushing buttons, and it's like, you know, noise cancellation
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on. And I'm like, I didn't know you had noise cancellation. It didn't actually respond to that
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comment of mine. So there you go. But to get to the Amazon Alexa feature, you just push this
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Actually, let's see, comes with handy instructions because you need them. You're going to have to study this
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Let's see. If I push it once, I get to Alexa, unless I'm on a phone call, in which case it mutes the call
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If I double push it, it gives me the ability to wake things up
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I don't know exactly what it's waking up. If I push and hold it, then I can turn on and off noise canceling
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On the right hand one, then a long push, let's see, on the top
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Well, let's do this in order. So the top buttons like I said you have power on power off pause play next track previous track etc volume all of that And actually next track and previous track are all in that center button
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So to give you an idea of how complicated this is, if I push it once, then I get pause play
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If I push it twice, dot, dot, then I get next track
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If I push it three times, dot, dot, dot, then I go to previous track
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If I push it and hold it, it turns off power. That is a lot of functionality on a single button, and that's a lot of
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of cognitive load if I can say so for one button on this device. So you know you have all that
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but we're not done because there's also this button on the end and that button with one push
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gives you chat mode on and off and we'll come back to that with two taps gives you ambient mode
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on and off. We already talked about that and push and hold and you can adjust to ambient volume
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So there's so much going on with these headphones. Really that's my biggest complaint. I think there's a lot
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of neat technology here but holy cow you really have to work at it to get this to actually work
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for you and it comes with an app so there's an app called ov loop which confusingly when you go and look
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in the app store it says it's a social network but it's actually a control device or i guess it's a
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social network but you need it to be able to get to things like alexa on this device so where
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this gets even more weird is as you can see here you have to pair it twice one pairing is
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for the audio and the other pairing is for the OV Loop app itself. So it's just like, boom, you know
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really complicated. But when you get it all hooked up, it is actually kind of interesting
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which gets us to OV chat. And here's the thing. You know, the company behind this OV Loop really
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wants to create a new way of us communicating where if I send you a text message, you also get
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the audio snippet of me, you know, stating or speaking that message
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So if I was to send a text message saying, how are you doing today
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You would be able to hear it because you'd have a little audio snippet
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And it would also say the words, how you're doing today? So kind of like a super Siri or super Google assistant
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But it's only if the other person also has the OV chat or OVLoop app that they will actually get both of those
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So, you know, I met this company and we talked for a while at CES a while back
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and they're really excited about this. My take on this is, I'm sorry, I don't want another social network and I don't want to have
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other people on the other end of my communication have to have a specific app for us to be
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able to get the maximum benefit. So basically, I would say probably the OV chat you'll never use if you're like me
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So then we sort of take that out of the equation and now we have headphones with good battery
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life and they have the ability for you to interact with Amazon Alexa software directly on your smartphone and they work with your voice assistant and they take calls So there a lot to like about these
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and the calls are very easy, very comfortable. The previous generation of this product
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had a clumsy little microphone sticking out. This one is clearly a far better design
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although probably too many buttons, but we already talked about that. The phone calls I made, they sounded terrific
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People were very happy with it. They had no idea. I wasn't just holding my phone up to my head, which I don't like to do
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And, you know, the music quality, when I was listening to music, I was listening to a lot of
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hollow notes pretty loud. And it sounded fantastic, really, really nice, even without noise cancellation, right
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Without the ANC, I didn't realize I had it. But then when I turned it on, it sounded even better
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And I was in fairly loud environments when I was auditioning these. So really props to them for getting all that right
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So really not much else to talk about. I think I've summarized the pros and the cons
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I would imagine over time you'd figure out all the buttons, but you're probably going to need this cheat sheet for a while to figure out
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Wait a minute. So I need to do a triple press, then a single press, then a double press
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then stand on one foot and then put my finger on my nose, and it will do this
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I am slightly exaggerating. So now, before I tell you the price
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let me go ahead and ask if you could subscribe to my channel. Really appreciate when you do that
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Cool. Now, these OV Pro headphones, and these are in rose gold
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You see, they're very nice. And interestingly, the rose gold packaging is red
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There's also a blue box, and the blue box is for the gunmetal black version of this
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which also look really nice. So, OVPro headphones, two different color choices, $179 from OVloop.com
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And I would say these are a pretty interesting choice. There's a lot of cool functionality
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I'm not entirely sold on having access to Alexa from my headphones
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but a lot of that is because I work in environments or I am in environments where either I have one of those units around
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or I'm in a noisy environment and I don't want to bother people by having my headphones on and saying
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hey, what time is it or what's the weather? It's super annoying. I mean, even right here, isn't that annoying
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So, you know, make your call. If all that sounds really cool, these are a good choice and worth
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checking out. So this is Dave Taylor. I am actually going to go back to my haul and oats
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which means that I will catch you in my next video
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