Everyone has one inner monologue When you’re on the train, riding your bike, or in the shower, chances are you’re thinking about the day ahead, the tasks you have to do, or maybe just reflecting on a conversation you had the night before. Much of it stays in our brains, soon to be forgotten or pushed away when the train pulls into the station. But what if you could subtly record it all in one place, ready to digest later?
That’s what a new company called Sandbar envisions for the Stream Ring, an AI-powered smart ring. The company emerged from stealth today after two years of development, led by co-founders 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 “voice mouse”
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The hardware is Stream Ring, a smart ring you wear on your index finger. Raise your hand and speak in the ring, and you can even whisper in crowded areas if you don’t want others to hear. It does not save any audio of your interactions with the ring; instead, like many of the AI-powered wearables on 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 many of the challenges of a voice interaction at the same time,” Fahmi tells me in a nondescript office space in Manhattan. “Mostly we envision it over the phone, with headphones, that allows you to interact immediately without any wake-up call.”
There’s a capacitive sensor on the ring’s flat edge, and a tap and hold lets you record your thoughts without being interrupted by an AI assistant. If the assistant answers you, a simple tap on the sensor will cut it off. The hardware will be waterproof at launch, so you don’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 to control volume. If, for some reason, Sandbar crashes and its AI backend goes offline, at least you’re left with a very expensive media controller, rather than hardware that quickly turns to e-waste. Currently, there are no health tracking features like most smart rings today.
