Whisper Into This AI-Powered Smart Ring to Organize Your Thoughts – Everyone has an inner monologue. When you’re commuting on the train, riding a bike, or in the shower, chances are you’re thinking about the day ahead, activities you need to do, or maybe just lingering over a discussion you had the night before. Much of this lingers in our thoughts, shortly to be forgotten or pushed away when the train comes to the station. But what if you could have it all gently recorded in one spot, ready for you to absorb later on? Whisper Into This AI-Powered Smart Ring to Organize Your Thoughts
That’s what a new firm named Sandbar envisions with Stream Ring, an AI-powered smart ring. The startup stepped out of stealth today following two years of development, led by cofounders Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong. Both previously worked at CTRL-Labs and later at Meta when Mark Zuckerberg’s firm acquired the neural interface business. It has raised $13 million in venture capital.
A “Mouse for Voice” Photograph
The hardware is Stream Ring, a smart ring you wear on your index finger. Raise your hand and chat into the ring, and you may even whisper into it in crowded settings if you don’t want people to hear. It doesn’t save any audio of your conversations with the ring; instead, much like many of the AI-powered wearables in the market right now, it transcribes your speech into text, which you can access in the Stream app. Whisper Into This AI-Powered Smart Ring to Organize Your Thoughts
“We think of this as the mouse for voice because it solves a lot of the challenges of a voice interaction at once,” Fahmi tells me in a generic office space in Manhattan. “We mostly imagine it phone away, earbuds in—this allows you to interact immediately with no wake word.”
There’s a capacitive sensor on the flat edge of the ring, and a tap-and-hold lets you record your ideas without being disturbed by an AI assistant. If the assistant answers to you, a simple tap on the sensor will switch it off. The hardware will be waterproof at launch, so you won’t have to worry about using it in the rain or on steamy days.
The Stream also acts as a media controller, meaning you can tap it once to play or pause music, double-tap for the next track, or swipe for volume control. If, for some reason, Sandbar falls under and its AI backend goes offline, at least you’re left with a very costly media controller, rather than hardware that soon turns into electronic junk. At now, there are no health-tracking capabilities like those on most smart rings today. Whisper Into This AI-Powered Smart Ring to Organize Your Thoughts
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