AI notetaking hardware has taken offoverthe pastcouple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins,andeven transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way.
One of the companies chasing that bet isSandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a$23 million Series Aled by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.
On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEOMina Fahmiabout why he thinks so many voice hardware devices before Stream struggled to break through, and why he’s betting that keeping the human firmly in control is what it’ll take to get wearable tech right.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Why Fahmi designed Stream to be push-to-talk instead of always-on, and what he thinks “social acceptability” means for wearable AI.
- How Fahmi’s time at CTRL-labs, the neural interface startup Metaacquiredin 2019, shaped his thinking on human-driven input.
- Why Sandbar chose the “gruelingly painful” path of building fully custom hardware instead of reskinning an off-the-shelf device.
- What Fahmi thinksit’lltake for voice wearables to break out of tech-enthusiast circles and into the mainstream.
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Theresa Loconsolo is an audio producer at TechCrunch focusing on Equity, the network’s flagship podcast. Before joining TechCrunch in 2022, she was one of 2 producers at a four-station conglomerate where she wrote, recorded, voiced and edited content, and engineered live performances and interviews from guests like lovelytheband. Theresa is based in New Jersey and holds a bachelors degree in Communication from Monmouth University.
You can contact or verify outreach from Theresa by emailing [email protected].
Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.
You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.