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Everyone has it Internal monologue. When you’re commuting on the train, riding a bike, or in the shower, you’re probably thinking about the day ahead, tasks you have to do, or maybe you’re thinking about a conversation you had the night before. Much of this stays in our brains, and will soon be forgotten or pushed away when the train arrives at the station. But what if you could subtly record it all in one place, ready for ingestion later?
That’s what a new company called Sandbar envisions for Stream Ring, an AI-powered smart ring. The company emerged from secrecy today after two years of development, led by co-founders Mina Fahmy and Kirak Hong. Both previously worked at CTRL Labs And later in Meta Matthew Mark Zuckerberg Company I got my neural interface started. It has raised $13 million in project funding.
“mouse for sound”
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Photo: Julian Chocato
The device is Stream Ring, A Smart ring You wear it on your index finger. Raise your hand and speak into the ring, and you can even whisper it in crowded areas if you don’t want others to hear you. It does not save any audio of your interactions with the ring; Instead, like a lot of AI-powered wearables are on the market nowIt converts your words into text that you can access in the Stream app.
“We think of this as a voice mouse because it solves a lot of voice interaction challenges at once,” Fahmy tells me in a casual office in Manhattan. “We often imagine the phone being put away, the earbuds in the ear, and this allows you to react instantly without needing a wake word.”
There’s a capacitive sensor on the flat edge of the ring, and tapping and holding lets you record your thoughts without the AI assistant interrupting you. If the assistant responds to you, a simple tap on the sensor will disconnect the connection. The device will be waterproof upon launch, so you don’t have to worry about using it in the rain or on sweaty 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 to control the volume. If, for some reason, the Sandbar crashes and the AI backend goes offline, at least you’ll be left with an expensive media console, rather than hardware Which quickly turns into electronic waste. Nowadays, there are no health tracking features like most of them have Smart rings today.