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A new memory card is waiting for me. When I open the app, I see a multi-panel bar called Big Little Moments. This is evident as soon as I plug the Looki AI back in to recharge, after about a month of not wearing it. It shows moments of me at a bar with my friend in Los Angeles, watching a theater show, eating a meal, seeing a demo, two women sitting across from me and then it’s just me, walking with a phone in my hand.
These moments are from two days in June, when I wore the Looki To the enhanced World Expo In Long Beach, California. I’ve been wearing it almost non-stop since April. He wore it to Apple’s WWDC conferencel Google I/O. I wore it to a Princeton college reunion. I wore it at home and on the go. Then I stopped.
the Looki L1 is a small black pendantIt’s roughly the size of a watch, with a camera on the front and microphones hidden somewhere. It has a clip and a lanyard. It can be worn around the neck or left leaning on a desk. It’s an AI wearable, but unlike smart glasses, it has a battery that can last all day while intermittently recording audio and video clips. My colleague Katie Collins tried it last year, but I wasn’t able to test it until the spring and summer.
Wearable AI devices in all forms are now everywhere. OpenAI The next one might be for one show. Some of these devices come In the form of glasses. Some are Pendants. Some are pins. Some of them are earbuds. As AI continues to become ubiquitous and tries to absorb more of our personal information that it can mold into patterns and narratives, wearables are the physical form of an attempt to give AI eyes, ears, and, increasingly, memories of your own life.
everyone Feeling anxious about smart glasses latelybecause of External camerasand the cruelty of AI technology and Meta’s Bad reputation for privacy. When I tell people I’m wearing Meta Ray-Bans, they tend to ask, “Is he recording me now?” I say no, then point Loki around my neck. “But that’s probably it.”
the Loki The device follows a long line of lifetime wearables dating back more than a decade. In 2014, I reviewed a life-recording camera from time to time It is called a narrative passagewhich promised to capture our memories. She found that her memory was, in practice, full of holes. In 2026, this is still very much the case.
The Looki L1 is a fun way to remember and record life’s moments, have a travel companion with you and save the moments without having to record them. To be a camera that can be worn all day.
But when I wore one, I felt embarrassed, like I was an idiot or a spy. At best, it’s strange. At worst, it feels like I’m a guy with a camera always running. It turns out that, in 2026, this won’t be nearly as “fun” as it was in 2014. I tested Looki because I was curious, and because I’m genuinely interested in the future of assistive memory technology.
What Looki L1 is and what it is not
As are many wearable AI devices, the Looki L1 is an odd product. The $250 camera doesn’t have a subscription, though the product team I spoke with suggested that some services could become subscription-based in the future. It uses its own AI service, and cannot link to any other platforms such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, or Anthropic’s Claude, although it borrows models from several sources.
I love the magnetic hanging strap that can be used as a charging dongle and can double as a desktop stand if you want to put it somewhere to take photos or video. The magnetic clasp works through clothing too, so the necklace can look like a pin. But I don’t like that the Looki’s active recording lights are small. They are less noticeable than those on Mita glasses by far.
There’s a phone app that Looki pairs with, just like a smartwatch or pair of smart glasses would. This is how the pendant gets firmware updates and uploads its recorded clips to your phone and the cloud.
Looki has an “AI Mode” that stays on and intermittently records short video clips (each no longer than about 5 seconds), and seems to capture interesting moments. In the three months of use, there doesn’t seem to be any pattern. There are dedicated buttons for playing manual audio recordings, still images or video recordings. There’s also a touchpad on the front, which I can press to summon the AI’s voice to chat with to get feedback about what I’ve recorded, or anything else. I rarely used it.
The Qualcomm chip in the Looki is an older watch-oriented model, but it still lasts a day on a charge. The future of such pendants is likely to be longer battery life, depending on the specifications The latest Qualcomm chips optimized for artificial intelligencereleased this year. These types of pendants can potentially do more on-device without relying on the cloud at all.
But, for the most part, Looki is a repository. It ingests images and videos, syncs them with its companion phone app (which takes several minutes) and analyzes them in the cloud later (which can take up to several hours). It’s like burying a time capsule and then digging it up later that day to see what you have.
And what did you get? Mostly a hot, sometimes gorgeous, often embarrassing mess.
As a memory maker, full of holes
What Looki does best is create comic book-like generative AI images based on the things it automatically captures. The results vary in style and structure, with absolutely no separate controls to turn anything into a comic if you so desire. I guess you just have to be lucky.
Some of the pictures of people I met who turned into comic characters were fun. Some storyboard-type comics have attempted to distill one or several days into the narrative. Sometimes they were clever (for one, a map of New York and New Jersey showing me navigation, seeing technology demos, and going to a Princeton meetup) felt shareable. One trip to WWDC, I was strangely focused on the breakfast I had before the event with my colleague Bridget Carey rather than all the watches I wore during Apple’s keynote, which were the focus of the entire day.
Sometimes Looki automatically inserts me into the photos, and invents a story. (Since I’m wearing the necklace, I was obviously not in the photo.) My comedic image ranged from weirdly subtle to something more like Marc Maron. One of the comical photos I took while buying coffee at the Hyatt was inexplicably made in the style of Minecraft.
As for the rest of the recorded memories? There are amazing videos made by AI, set to pre-set individual music. The tone often feels generic, and videos are often shot at bad angles. When I was having coffee with friends, many of the clips were accidental shots. Other times, faces were cut out of the image. (Did you need to wear the necklace higher up?)
Looki seemed to take videos and not photos automatically, which was difficult to download and share with friends. Also, many of the clips captured were either too short or had people discussing things that no one had agreed to share in the first place. If you wear Looki, be prepared to do a lot of warning, explaining, and apologizing.
Would I like to look at them? Kind of, but very few are actually good. You can just take photos and videos when you want, instead of turning on the AI mode to record intermittently. But then, if you do that, the device won’t feel like a real life track.
Unfortunately, it showed me a lot of super shots taken on my phone. This of course explains the sad state of my life. I’m on my phone a lot. too much. And the storyboards, the spontaneous shots, they all tended to have at least one shot of me looking at my phone, with the necklace around my neck, over and over again.
Besides automatically keeping and capturing life history videos and creating comedic clips, it weirdly tries to analyze the meals you’ve eaten (without any real success), and it also throws up random notifications from time to time based on location, I assume, and what the camera sees. These notifications are intended to be smart and context-aware. Sometimes they’re weirdly to the point (they tell me I’m in AWE and remind me of the opening statement, even though I never told them I was in AWE). Other times, you notice a store or perhaps a person standing nearby. Again, like everything else Looki does, these notifications can’t be customized at all.
As a general device, it’s embarrassing
My son has asked me to take off his Looki necklace more times than I can count. My wife shamed me for my decision to wear it to a Japanese supermarket (I didn’t). People who saw it at public events, like WWDC or Google I/O, were either somewhat curious or somewhat annoyed. I took it off oddly often and put it in my pocket on trains, in bathrooms, and increasingly in many other places.
At Whole Foods, someone next to me noticed this while I was shopping for chocolate bars and asked if I was recording. I explained that it might be so and that I test technical products for my business. They said they’re not that bothered, they know people are wearing cameras more and more. I couldn’t believe they weren’t upset. This reaction also stuck with me. I wear smart glasses at least half the time now. Where does this put me on the socially acceptable spectrum? Don’t tell me.
I still find smart glasses less embarrassing personally, because they look and function like real glasses. In fact, Meta glasses rarely register anything. While the Meta has an auto-capture mode for glasses now, turning it on will quickly wear down the battery.
Meanwhile, the Looki doesn’t do anything at all except act as an AI camera necklace on your neck. To remember to charge it and wear it, like a weird necklace no one asked for… I can’t justify it. I made myself wear it for more weeks than I thought I would. Now, its batteries are dead and it’s in a bag somewhere. I gave up.
Looki has really been just my memory animation builder, for the most part, as you can see from all the pictures I’ve shared. It’s interesting, but I can’t choose when it happens, or how it happens. And it’s not enough to keep me wearing Loki. As you can see above, this photo was taken on occasion when I went into my bathroom. (I’ve never kept it in an actual public bathroom, but that’s exactly the nightmare that Looki is.)
If devices like Looki can be true memory assistants, deeply conscious and able to help see and guide you — or, if they are better cameras, taking photos I would actually use — or, if they can be linked to AI services that I actually semi-trust and recognize — well, maybe. For now, Looki looks more like a harbinger. One of the glasses that will actually have longer battery life, one day soon, and be able to record all day long, albeit intermittently. And more AI pendants.
When that day comes, yes, my glasses will probably really register all the time. And yes, this is worrying. But what’s even more troubling is the lack of any efforts on the part of tech companies to more deeply manage the privacy and control of these random AI-powered wearables. Or to raise their level beyond mere tricks.
What I’ve learned is that I’ve reached my limit. Looki’s not on me anymore. But Loki’s spirit is everywhere else, and it’s coming quickly.
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