Why Stream ring-maker Sandbar says the future of AI wearables is voice

AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even 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 is Sandbar , the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEO Mina Fahmi about 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.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube , Apple Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads , at @EquityPod.

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] . View Bio October 13 – 15 San Francisco Scale faster. Grow your portfolio. Gain practical expertise. No matter your goal, Disrupt can empower you. Save up to $300 toda y!

Delta investigating after someone set up fake Wi-Fi network mid-flight Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Anthropic says it will watermark text generated by its AI models Ivan Mehta

Mark Zuckerberg’s AI manifesto is exactly why people don’t like AI Russell Brandom

YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money Aisha Malik

This ‘adversarial’ pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you Zack Whittaker

Tesla and SpaceX will invest $16.8B to start building ‘Terafab’ chip factory in Texas Sean O'Kane