Anker has unveiled its first proprietary AI chip, THUS, together with the new Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro and Liberty 5 Pro Max earbuds, marking a significant shift in how AI processing is handled in compact consumer hardware.
The launch took place at Anker Day in New York, with Anker positioning the new earbuds as the first consumer products to use its neural-net compute-in-memory architecture.
The biggest announcement is THUS, an AI chip designed to process neural-network tasks directly inside NOR Flash memory. Anker claims this removes the need to move model parameters back and forth between memory and processor, a process that typically consumes more than 90 per cent of available chip power before actual computation begins.
By embedding computation where the model already resides, THUS can redirect more energy towards inference itself while also reducing the physical footprint required for AI processing.
Anker is using the Liberty 5 Pro and Liberty 5 Pro Max as the first commercial showcase for that chip. The earbuds are built around three layers of on-device intelligence: understanding, adapting and tuning.
Anker has achieved a Guinness World Records certification awarded in April 2026 to the soundcore Liberty 5 Pro for the highest speech quality score, or G-MOS, recorded for true wireless stereo earbuds in objective testing. The Liberty 5 Pro Max uses identical earbud hardware and delivers equivalent call performance.
The earbuds are developed with a 10-sensor system comprising eight MEMS microphones and two bone conduction sensors, working together through the THUS chip. The microphones capture the surrounding acoustic environment, while the bone conduction sensors detect the user’s voice through cranial vibration rather than airborne sound.
The chip cross-references both inputs at the same time, allowing more precise voice isolation than microphone-only systems in noisier environments.
“Every AI chip built until now stores the model on one side and does the computation on the other. To think, the device has to carry all those parameters across, many times per second, every single inference. THUS puts the computation where the model already lives. The model never has to move again.”
Steven Yang, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Anker Innovations
The Liberty 5 Pro Max adds another layer through an AI Note-Taker function. Its charging case, which uses a 1.78-inch AMOLED display, can record meetings without a connected phone and then generate transcripts, speaker identification and action items through the soundcore app.
The case has 512MB of onboard flash, allowing up to 12 hours of local recording. Cloud transcription deletes audio immediately after processing, while local files are encrypted with AES-256 and transmissions secured through TLS 1.3.
Noise cancellation is another major part. Anker says Adaptive ANC 4.0 monitors external and in-ear noise at 384,000 samples per second and adjusts cancellation depth in real time across different frequencies.
This provides up to twice the cancellation depth of the Liberty 4 Pro, while also reducing the pressure sensation that fixed-level active noise cancellation can create during longer listening sessions.
For sound personalisation, both models use HearID 5.0, which builds an EQ profile from an in-app hearing test. Its AI Sound Enhancement feature reconstructs some of the frequency content lost in Bluetooth compression, claiming to restore up to 65 per cent of audio quality typically discarded in wireless transmission.
Beyond those headline features, both earbuds support three-device multipoint connectivity, Apple Find My, Google Fast Pair, IP55 dust and water resistance, and battery life rated at 6.5 hours with active noise cancellation on, or 28 hours in total with the charging case.
Liked this? Check out more articles on Futr tech here.
