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When they were first released in 2018, Bose’s noise-inducing Sleepbuds were hailed as a game changer for those dealing with snoring sleep partners. Alas, Bose experienced some issues with the battery in both the first model and the second-gen version, and ended up discontinuing the Sleepbuds, much to the chagrin of many people who really liked them. However, three former Bose developers got the rights to Sleepbuds and now they have come out with new Sleepbuds under their new Ozlo brand. They feature the same design as the original Sleepbuds — both the buds and the charging case look the same — but they have an important new feature: you can now stream other audio from the buds to your phone via Bluetooth (the original Sleepbuds just kept the muted sounds on the buds and it didn’t allow music streaming).

One of the biggest strengths of the Sleepbuds is how small they are and how comfortably they fit in most people’s ears (they come with different sized ear tips). I had no problems wearing them even though I am a side sleeper. While they aren’t noise canceling headphones, they have good noise isolation and do a great job of canceling out ambient noise when you put in one of the masking sounds, whether it’s the waves crashing on the ocean, the pouring rain, the crackling of the fire. fire and so on. You can also set a personal alarm to ring in your ears so your sleeping partner won’t be disturbed and the buds can hear when you’re sleeping while listening to music and automatically kick in your chosen noise canceling sound. Finally, there are other sleep monitoring features.

I can’t say that everything has always worked well and I think Ozlo is still working out the kinks with its iOS and Android app. If you’re streaming music — don’t expect much bass but the sound was better than I thought it would be — you should keep the buds case close because the case is used for streaming — and charging, of course (the buds are rated for up to 10 hours of battery life) . But overall I’m impressed with this new iteration of the Sleepbuds and hope there are no battery issues going forward.