Everyone has an inner monologue. When you’re commuting on the train, riding a bike, or in the shower, chances are you’re thinking about the day ahead, tasks you need to do, or maybe just mulling over a conversation you had the night before. Much of this stays in our brains, soon to be forgotten or pushed away when the train comes to the station. But what if you could have it all subtly recorded in one place, ready for you to digest later on?
That’s what a new company called Sandbar envisions for Stream Ring, an AI-powered smart ring. The company emerged out of stealth today after two years of development, led by cofounders Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong. Both previously worked at CTRL-Labs and later at Meta when Mark Zuckerberg’s company acquired the neural interface startup. It has raised $13 million in venture funding.
A “Mouse for Voice”
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The hardware is Stream Ring, a smart ring you wear on your index finger. Raise your hand and talk into the ring, and you can even whisper into it in crowded areas if you don’t want others to hear. It doesn’t save any audio of your interactions with the ring; instead, much like many of the AI-powered wearables in the market right now, it transcribes your words into text, which you can access in the Stream app.
“We think of this as the mouse for voice because it solves a lot of the challenges of a voice interaction at once,” Fahmi tells me in a nondescript office space in Manhattan. “We mostly imagine it phone away, earbuds in—this allows you to interact immediately with no wake word.”
There’s a capacitive sensor on the flat edge of the ring, and a tap-and-hold lets you record your thoughts without being interrupted by an AI assistant. If the assistant responds to you, a simple tap on the sensor will cut it off. The hardware will be waterproof at launch, so you won’t have to worry about using it in the rain or on sweaty days.
The Stream also doubles as a media controller, meaning you can tap it once to play or pause music, double-tap for the next track, or swipe for volume control. If, for some reason, Sandbar goes under and its AI backend goes offline, at least you’re left with a very expensive media controller, rather than hardware that quickly turns into electronic waste. At present, there are no health-tracking features like those on most smart rings today.
