An always-on AI note-taker? This startup believes that you can just use your phone

Display floors Consumer Electronics Show 2026 Filled with note-taking devices and companion AI-powered devices that listen to everything around you so you can go back and have the computer remember the conversation you just had. People at for you I think someone else has already got the hardware right, and all they need to give you is the app.

Pratyush Rai, CEO of Thine, said in an interview that he decided to create an app for Apple iPhone Because the functions he would have needed to create a device, e.g pinA bell Or a pendant that already has the phone’s microphone and Siri functionality.

“What we realized is that we shouldn’t try to solve a problem from a hardware standpoint and from a privacy standpoint that Apple has already solved,” he said.

Your iPhone streams live audio while you wait to say “Hey Siri,” and Tine uses the same functionality to capture and transcribe your conversations. Its microphone also has very good noise cancellation – something the new hardware company will have to work on improving on its own.

From there, Thain takes over, training the AI ​​model on those texts so you can ask questions like, “What did this AI director tell me one day at CES?” It will respond like a typical chatbot, with a summary of that conversation. At CES, I watched Ray ask Thayne to recall the conversation we first had about the app two weeks ago, and she provided very precise and comprehensive detail.

Your app doesn’t store audio recordings of your conversations, Ray said. The exact transcripts aren’t available at the moment, but the company is working on a new version that provides those transcripts and allows you to upload them to your chatbot, as if you were running the voice memos app all the time and just kept the transcripts. The decision to allow people access to verbatim texts came after feedback from users of competing AI-powered note-taking devices, who said they really wanted the actual transcripts, Ray said.

Right now, a fully functional Thine app is an expensive subscription: $200 per month. Ray said the target audience is tech executives and founders who want to track all of their network conversations. But he expects prices to fall dramatically with volume, including as AI models and software improve. These improvements actually allow the company to set up a version that only offers copies for $1 a month, he said.

The big cost remains long-term storage – and keeping it safe. Making those ancient conversations accessible through an AI model is essential to reducing hallucinations, when AI makes up things to fill in gaps in context, Ray said. When you’re trying to remember conversations you’ve already had with real people, you don’t want an AI’s best guess at what you talked about. You need the truth.

Being able to get that is key to Rai’s goal of creating an AI tool that helps you have better connections not with a chatbot, but with other people. He doesn’t want people to build relationships with you, but with each other. “This is not something we would imagine with you,” he said.