In order to use Bluetooth, a device must be compatible with the subset of Bluetooth profiles (often called services or functions) necessary to use the desired services. A Bluetooth profile is a specification regarding an aspect of Bluetooth-based wireless communication between devices. It resides on top of the Bluetooth Core Specification and (optionally) additional protocols. While the profile may use certain features of the core specification, specific versions of profiles are rarely tied to specific versions of the core specification, making them independent of each other. For example, there are Hands-Free Profile (HFP) 1.5 implementations using both Bluetooth 2.0 and Bluetooth 1.2 core specifications.

The way a device uses Bluetooth depends on its profile capabilities. The profiles provide standards that manufacturers follow to allow devices to use Bluetooth in the intended manner. For the Bluetooth Low Energy stack, according to Bluetooth 4.0 a special set of profiles applies.

A host operating system can expose a basic set of profiles (namely OBEX, HID and Audio Sink) and manufacturers can add additional profiles to their drivers and stack to enhance what their Bluetooth devices can do. Devices such as mobile phones can expose additional profiles by installing appropriate apps.

At a minimum, each profile specification contains information on the following topics:

This article summarizes the current definitions of profiles defined and adopted by the Bluetooth SIG and possible applications of each profile.

This profile defines how multimedia audio can be streamed from one device to another over a Bluetooth connection (it is also called Bluetooth Audio Streaming). For example, music can be streamed from a mobile phone, laptop, or desktop to a wireless headset, hearing aid/cochlear implant streamer, or car audio; voice can be streamed from a microphone device to a recorder on a mobile phone or computer. The Audio/Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP) is often used in conjunction with A2DP for remote control on devices such as headphones, car audio systems, or stand-alone speaker units. These systems often also implement Headset (HSP) or Hands-Free (HFP) profiles for telephone calls, which may be used separately.

Each A2DP service, of possibly many, is designed to uni-directionally transfer an audio stream in up to 2 channel stereo, either to or from the Bluetooth host. This profile relies on AVDTP and GAVDP. It includes mandatory support for the low-complexity SBC codec (not to be confused with Bluetooth's voice-signal codecs such as CVSDM), and supports optionally MPEG-1 Part 3/MPEG-2 Part 3 (MP2 and MP3), MPEG-2 Part 7/MPEG-4 Part 3 (AAC and HE-AAC), and ATRAC, and is extensible to support manufacturer-defined codecs, such as aptX. For an extended list of codecs, see List of codecs § Bluetooth.

While designed for a one-way audio transfer - CSR has developed a way to transfer a mono stream back (and enable use of headsets with microphones), and incorporated it into FastStream and aptX Low Latency codecs. The patent has expired.