Anker’s Thus AI Chip Propels Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro to World Record

by Aaron Leong — Friday, May 22, 2026, 10:49 AM EDT

Unveiled at the Anker Day event in New York, Soundcore's new Liberty 5 Pro and Pro Max are the first-ever consumer products to feature Anker’s highly anticipated, proprietary Thus AI processor, a chip that's claimed to handle AI functions, noise suppression, and phone call processing on device.

By abandoning traditional cloud-reliant computing, the bespoke Thus AI chip utilizes a compute-in-memory architecture that fuses the CPU and memory. The company claims that Thus performs up to 150 times better than the previous gen Liberty 4 Pro while drastically lowering power consumption.

The most bewildering evidence of this hardware drop is a Guinness World Record. Don't laugh, but the Liberty 5 Pro lineup has been officially certified as achieving the highest speech quality score for true wireless earbuds. To earn this title, the Thus AI chip coordinates eight high-performance microphones and two specialized bone conduction sensors. By tracking physical skull vibrations alongside ambient sound waves, the onboard neural net effortlessly isolates human speech. Callers can supposedly whisper in a chaotic 100-decibel environment, such as a roaring subway or a packed coffee shop, and their voice will still come through clearly.

Elsewhere, the additional computing headroom makes it way into the audio experience. The earbuds's Adaptive ANC 4.0 samples both external environment noise and internal ear-canal leakages at a rate of 384,000 times per second, which the company says makes it twice as effective as Soundcore's previous flagship. Thus it also powers HearID 5.0 and an AI Audio Enhancer, which intelligently reconstructs up to 65% of acoustic details typically destroyed by standard Bluetooth compression, similar to how Sony's DSEE Extreme upscaler works.

While all the features can be accessed on the app, Soundcore has also allowed most of the functions to be accessible on the storage case. The Liberty 5 Pro sports a UI as part of its 0.96-inch TFT touchscreen on the front edge of its charging case. Moving up to the Liberty 5 Pro Max gives users a massive 1.78-inch AMOLED touchscreen located on the entire top surface of the case.

This upgraded Pro Max charging case also functions as an independent productivity hub. It features a standalone AI Note-Taker capable of recording lectures or business meetings onto onboard storage without a smartphone needed, subsequently pushing the audio to the app to generate automated transcripts, differentiate between speakers, and outline action items.

Additionally, the Thus chip drives native, two-way AI translation supporting a large language library. Both models round out their premium spec sheets with Bluetooth 6.1, IP55 dust-water resistance, and battery life of up to 6.5 hours with ANC enabled.

The Liberty 5 Pro and Pro Max are available now, though if you want to save some money, both the non-Pro Liberty and previous-generation Liberty 4 Pro are on sale...