Reed’s view
A lot of the silly AI hardware products that have launched and failed tried to do too much. Finally, someone has built a product that breaks new ground on the concept of simplicity. I haven’t tried the Pebble Index, a ring that can record audio snippets, but I want to. It costs $75 to preorder and $99 once it’s officially out, and you never have to charge it. When the battery runs out after “years,” you send it back to the company. That might sound annoying to some people, but I really don’t want another thing I have to charge. It’s a big reason I don’t wear an Apple Watch.
When you press the button on the ring, the audio is sent to the Pebble App, where local AI models can parse it and perform functions like set a reminder on your to-do list. That feature alone might save my marriage. There’s no cloud involved, no subscription, no personal messages going anywhere but your phone, so it doesn’t have the creepiness factor that the “always on” AI listening devices suffer from.
Eric Migicovsky, who sold Pebble to Fitbit a decade ago and recently bought back the trademark, has opened the whole thing up so that new features can be hacked by tinkerers. There are a lot of possibilities.
It’s a fair comment that this is a feature you could add to your phone. But if you’re like me, you just don’t. Apple’s walled garden makes it difficult to do much of anything without unlocking the phone and opening up another app. Sometimes, even that smallest amount of friction means your fleeting thought of adding a reminder is lost forever.
Notable
- Pebble faces competition from New York-based startup Sandbar, which also recently launched a smart ring that transcribes a user’s recorded thoughts. Sandbar relies more heavily on AI processing with its chatbot talking back to users, where Migicovsky told Wired, “I’m not as interested in the AI persona.”