You’re having coffee with a friend when you notice him lifting his hand to his mouth and whispering something you can’t quite catch. You stop mid-sentence and give him a puzzled look, but the moment passes and he resumes the conversation. A few minutes later, it happens again.
Finally, you ask what’s bothering him because he seems distracted. He holds up his hand and points to a shiny ring on his index finger.
An AI ring, he explains.
Something you said sparked a thought. Rather than risk forgetting it, he whispered it into the ring before it slipped away. The ring faithfully recorded it and beamed it back to its mothership app on his phone.
Inner voice
The AI ring belongs to a new category of gadgets that feels one step closer to an implant. In many ways, it's a quest for subtlety. Instead of pulling out your phone and conspicuously typing a passing thought, you lightly press the ring and whisper it away.
Startup Sandbar's Stream ring, for instance, calls itself a ‘private voice ring for everything on your mind.’ It exists because ‘the mind moves quickly and thoughts rarely wait.’
So you capture them for eternity.
I'm not entirely convinced. Most of us are already reasonably well-equipped to remember the thoughts that actually matter.
There's more to the Stream ring. Sandbar CEO Mina describes it as a self-extension. Whether an idea relates to your personal life or your professional one, it shouldn't get lost in the chaos of everyday life. The ring, supposedly, prevents that.
It has another purpose. It allows you to talk with your thoughts or think aloud. On the companion app, a user records a few voice samples. The app builds a replica of your voice which can subsequently converse with you about your own thoughts.
I find this one of the more bizarre directions AI gadgets are headed in.
Why exactly do we need to force natural internal speech to become external? It’s internal by design—and often subconscious. In trying to solve a problem that barely exists, gadgets like these risk making people look deeply awkward. Whispering into your knuckles is bound to attract attention. Anyone nearby is likely to assume it's something to do with them.
Subtly conspicuous
We're still not entirely comfortable with people staring at their phones in company or carrying on conversations through earphones.
You aren’t alone if you sometimes find yourself responding to someone because you believe he’s talking to you, only to realise they were speaking to someone else through their earphones.
Talking into a smartwatch never really caught on either. It may have been designed to be subtler than a smartphone, but it ends up being quite noticeable.
Humans are wired to pick up the smallest cues in body language, consciously or otherwise. It's long been understood that much of communication is non-verbal. A slight shift in posture, a raised eyebrow, a fleeting widening of the pupils—we register it all.
Yet the hardware we introduce into these interactions changes the rules in peculiar ways. The Stream ring isn't alone. There's Wizpr, which records without even requiring a wake word; simply raising your hand towards your face is enough.
Social blindspot
The tech industry is becoming flooded with socially tone-deaf experiments.
If it isn't AI rings, it's lapel pins designed to continuously index your day like an active legal deposition, or electronic lollipops that use bone conduction to play music through your skull while you attempt to maintain eye contact.
They're all trying desperately to solve the problem of screen time, while forgetting that the alternatives they've created make the user impossible to ignore.
Silicon Valley can build a microphone sensitive enough to isolate a whisper in a thunderstorm, but it still can't solve the basic social friction of looking ridiculous. The biggest hurdle for the next generation of AI hardware shouldn't be battery life or processor speed.
It should be our collective refusal to stand in public and talk to our hands.
The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.
Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.