Whisper into this AI-powered shrewd ring to organize your thoughts

Everyone has internal monologue. When you’re commuting to work by train, riding your bike, or taking a shower, you’re probably thinking about the day ahead, the tasks you need to get done, or maybe you’re just thinking about a conversation you had the night before. Much of this remains in our brains, and is soon forgotten or pushed aside once the train arrives at the station. What if you could have it all subtly recorded in one place, ready for you to digest later?

That’s what modern company Sandbar envisions for the Stream Ring, an AI-powered shrewd ring. The company emerged from stealth today after two years of development, led by co-founders Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong. The two previously worked at CTRL-Labs and later at Meta when Mark Zuckerberg’s company acquired the neural interface startup. He raised $13 million in venture capital funding.

“Mouse for Voice”

The hardware is the Stream Ring, a shrewd ring you wear on your index finger. Raise your hand and speak into the ring, and in crowded places you can even whisper if you don’t want others to hear. Does not record any sounds of interaction with the ring; instead, like many AI-powered wearables on the market today, it transcribes your words into text that you can access in the Stream app.

“We consider it a voice mouse because it solves many of the problems associated with voice interaction at once,” Fahmi says in an unassuming Manhattan office. “We usually imagine that the phone is away, the headphones are on – so you can interact immediately without waking up.”

There’s a capacitive sensor on the flat edge of the ring, and you can tap and hold to capture your thoughts without disturbing the AI ​​assistant. If the assistant responds to you, simply touching the sensor will turn it off. The device will be waterproof at launch, so you don’t have to worry about using it in the rain or on sweaty days.

Stream also doubles as a media controller, which means you can tap it once to play or pause music, double-click to skip to the next song, or swipe to adjust the volume. If for some reason Sandbar crashes and its AI backend is disabled, at least you’ll be left with a very pricey media controller rather than hardware that quickly turns into electronic waste. There are currently no health tracking features like those available on most shrewd rings today.