Smart rings from Pebble and Stream are looking like the AI gadget to beat

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.

Fahmi and Sandbar are trying to do something different. The Stream is a more introverted device, focused on capturing your voice rather than everyone else’s. (Another of the ring’s promised features is a whisper mode — Fahmi spoke to the thing so quietly I couldn’t hear a word he said, and the Stream still transcribed perfectly. Or at least Fahmi said it did.) Fahmi says the idea for the device came because he likes to walk a lot and got annoyed having to dig out his phone every time he had an idea or wanted to ask his AI assistant for something.

The Stream ring, accordingly, has three jobs: to start a chat with an AI assistant, to take notes, and to dictate text. Right now, most of those things happen in the Stream companion app. But that’s not the right long-term answer, nor is it Sandbar’s long-term plan. Ultimately, devices like these should be connected to all the other tools you use, so that you can chat with whatever assistant you want, take notes straight to your existing app, and dictate into any text box anywhere. On that last front, Stream is already making some fascinating progress: At one point in his demo, Fahmi flashed a new firmware onto the ring, connected it to his Mac and his iPhone, and was able to seamlessly dictate text into one device and then the other. He wouldn’t tell me how it worked, but it worked shockingly smoothly.

I’ve tested a lot of AI gadgets, and most of them are just poor replacements for your smartphone. But our phones are terrible input systems. You have to get your phone, unlock it, open an app, create a new note or start a new conversation, tap, and type, just to get a thought out of your head. Voice assistants and AI chatbots make some interactions easier, but a lot of modern life still involves typing in text boxes. Nattering away at my laptop is fine in the comfort and quiet of my own home; in a coffee shop, on a train, or even walking down the street, it’s both socially problematic and technically much harder. (And frankly, I’m not that interested in normalizing everyone talking to their AI best friends in public.) Smart rings might solve the problem: You just bring the ring to your mouth, press a button, and talk. The gesture feels natural, the mic is close enough to your mouth to pick up your voice accurately, and the whole process is far more unobtrusive than shouting into your headphones.

A few companies are already working on this kind of AI ring. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky created the Index 01 for the same reason Fahmi built the Stream: He needed the fastest possible way to get ideas, reminders, and notes out of his head. There’s also Vocci, a more meeting-focused version of the same thing. Over time, we might see existing rings from companies like Oura and Ultrahuman start to add some of this tech too. It’s not complicated tech! It’s a microphone. All the complicated stuff happens elsewhere, on the devices you almost certainly also have with you.

Most of these are not finished or shipping products, but I’m increasingly compelled by the prospect of talking more with my devices — and increasingly convinced that there’s no better place to put a microphone than on my finger. Smart rings don’t try to replace or obviate your phone — they just let you keep it in your pocket a lot more often.