// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Smart rings are looking like my kind of AI gadget
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While everyone tries to make smart glasses, pins, and everything else happen, the most subtle device might be the best device.
While everyone tries to make smart glasses, pins, and everything else happen, the most subtle device might be the best device.
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Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to my computer. One underrated feature of the LLM revolution has been a remarkable leap in all kinds of dictation technology — even the fastest, cheapest models are getting very good at understanding and processing speech. I’ve tested lots of these apps, from WisprFlow to Monologue to Spokenly to Handy to so many others, and have found them all to be useful ways to quickly write emails, Slack messages, and more. They sometimes default to giving everything a too-formal style of formatting and love ending a text message with a period (like a sociopath), but they’re getting better at that too.
But nothing has convinced me of the future of talking to my computer quite like a demo I got recently from Mina Fahmi. Fahmi is the CEO of Sandbar, which is making a smart ring called the Stream that is scheduled to ship later this year. As I sat in a conference room in Sandbar’s New York City offices, Fahmi gave me a rundown of the device’s features, including the latest one: dictation to all your devices. He opened up a new note in Apple Notes, held the ring up to his mouth, pressed the device’s touchpad with his thumb, and chatted quietly to himself for a few seconds. A moment after he finished, two complete — and correctly transcribed — sentences appeared in the note.
The Stream itself is basically just a microphone, a battery, and a Bluetooth connection to your phone. You could describe a lot of AI gadgets the same way, now that seemingly everyone wants to sell you a way to record your conversations and meetings to extract summaries and action items. Companies like Plaud and Pocket and FoCase and Mobvoi and so many others are all happy to sell you these portable recorders — bonus points if it sticks to your phone to record phone calls.