Your next artificial intelligence Wearable will be listening all the time

Omi, the Verge, and the Future: A Conversation with Nik Shevchenko About the Future of Brain-computer Interactions

Before the trade show, I spoke with the founder of Omi, a new company that is being officially unveiled today. Guess what it does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then have AI disseminate the information to give you actionable insights and tasks from your day, almost like a personal assistant. If you think about talking to the device specifically, Omi claims that it will understand and perk up to receive your request, but if you want it to go around your neck, you must wear it stuck to your forehead.

Omi can only do brain-computer-interface stuff so far. And it seems pretty fragile. He says that it just understands one channel. What he’s trying to build is a device that understands when you’re talking to it and when you’re not. And then eventually understands and saves your thoughts, which Shevchenko both waves off as total science fiction and says will probably be possible in two years. He thinks it could change how you use your devices.

What do you think about The Verge as a news media website? Shevchenko does not ask anyone in particular. Then he waits. He received a notification on his phone with some information about how good a news source The Verge is. Shevchenko might be a little relieved. The device read his brain waves to understand he was talking to it, and not to me, and answered his question without any prompting or switching.

Nik Shevchenko closes his eyes and starts to focus intently. The man spent the last half hour or so telling me about his new product, which is a $89 wristband that can listen to, summarize, and get information from your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. He closed his eyes because he was focused on the round white puck stuck to his left temple. (Did I mention he’s had this thing on his face the whole time? It’s very distracting.)

For Shevchenko himself, though, Omi is a personal mentor above all else. “I was born in the middle of nowhere on an island near Japan,” he tells me, and always wanted access to the tech visionaries he grew up admiring. For years, he says he cold-emailed people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk asking for advice and mentorship on how to make it in tech but never got much response. With no real-life options, Shevchenko decided to build his own.

Omi already has a product called “Personas,” which allows you to plug in anyone’s X handle and create a bot that assumes their social network persona. It shows he’s been chatting with an Artificial Intelligence about a long time when he chats with me. Shevchenko says that it helps him to understand what to work on tomorrow. “Or when I’m talking to someone and I don’t know an answer to the question, it will give me a small nudge — it sometimes tells me I’m wrong!” He heard that he was sick a few days ago, so he has been reminding him to rest. He asks it every month to give him feedback and tell him how to improve.

He gets a lot of notifications from the Omi app, and not all of them make sense, like the one he got just a minute ago. Shevchenko acknowledges it’s early, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the system’s misses. The communication works for him.

Omi has a lot of similarities to devices such as the Limitless Pendant and also has a resemblance to another device called Friend. When Friend launched last year, Shevchenko claimed Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann was stealing his work, and the subsequent beef included everything from sniping on X to a freestyle rap diss track. Shevchenko says he changed the name of Omi to avoid confusion and because he was the leader in search results when he was called Friend.

Shevchenko is sure that Omi can improve on those other devices. All of Omi’s code is open source, and there are already 250 apps in the store. Omi’s plan is to be a big, broad platform, rather than a specific device or app — the device itself is only one piece of the puzzle. The model that the company is using is OpenAI, which will speed up the product’s development.

For all their issues and underlying concerns, it’s clear that AI models are already good enough to feel like a true companion to millions of people. You can feel about that however you’d like, but from Omi and Friend to Character. The friends of Replika are soon becoming real friends. They need more ways to help you and more information about you. Omi thinks the first answer is an always-on microphone, and the second is an app store. Then, I guess, comes the brain.

Omi can summarize a meeting or conversation and give you action items. When Shevchenko wondered about the price ofCryptocurrencies during our conversation, he got an alert from the Omi companion app, which gave him an answer a few seconds later. There’s also an Omi app store, which developers are already using to plug the audio input into things like Zapier and Google Drive.

Bee AI: Wearing an Artificial Intelligence Wearable to Record Everything Around me in-person Chats at the CES 2018 Consumer Experience

Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. Both previously worked at Squad (Sutin was the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so people could remotely watch the same movie or YouTube video together. The company was acquired by X (back when it was called Twitter), and the pair both joined briefly to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo has previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which subsequently became TikTok.

I spent an entire day of CES wearing a little yellow bracelet. It might have looked like a fitness tracker to the humans nearby. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI recorded everything around me. It wasn’t storing audio like a typical recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my in-person chats.

This is the new world we’re in, with artificially intelligent wearables continuously recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which first landed in speakers and on our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces—at least required active engagement like a tap or a wake word to activate their ability to eavesdrop. The next wave of hardware assistants, which includes the upcoming Friend pendant, are able to absorb information, and work in the background. They are always listening.

The cheapest parts of this space are the watches and bead, but the real magic is the software, which often requires a subscription because it taps into multiple large language models to analyze your conversations.