Omi is another AI companion wearable — but this one’s trying to read your mind

Nick Shevchenko closes his eyes and begins to concentrate intently. He’s spent the last half hour telling me about his new product, an $89 wearable device called Water who can listen, summarize and extract information from your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. So his eyes are closed and he focuses all his attention on the round white puck taped to his left temple with medical tape. (Did I mention he had that thing on his face the whole time? It’s very distracting.)

“Hey, what are you thinking about? Edgefor example, a news media website?” – Shevchenko asks, to no one in particular. Then he waits. About fifteen seconds later, a notification appears on his phone with some AI-generated information about how reputable and awesome the news source is. Edge is. Shevchenko is excited and may have calmed down a little. The device read his brain waves to understand that he was talking to him and not to me, and answered his question without any prompts or switches.

For now, that’s all Omi can do with the brain-computer interface. And it seems quite fragile. “It only understands one channel,” he says, “that’s one electrode.” He’s trying to create a device that understands when you’re talking to it and when you’re not. And then, in the end, it understands and stores your thoughts, which Shevchenko simultaneously dismisses as complete science fiction and says that it will probably be possible in two years. He believes that whenever this happens, it could change the way you use your AI devices.

For now, the Omi’s real purpose is much simpler: it’s an always-listening device (the battery apparently lasts three days on a charge) that you wear on a strap around your neck that can help you make sense of your daily life. life. There is no wake word, but you can still talk to him directly because he is always on. Think of it as 80 percent companion and 20 percent Alexa assistant.

Omi can summarize the meeting or conversation and suggest actions for you to take. He can give you information – Shevchenko casually asked about the price of Bitcoin during our conversation and within seconds received a notification from the Omi companion app with an answer. There’s also the Omi app store, which developers are already using to connect audio input to things like Zapier and Google Drive.

However, for Shevchenko himself, Omi is first and foremost a personal mentor. “I was born in the middle of nowhere on an island off Japan,” he tells me, and always wanted access to the technological visionaries he grew up admiring. For years, he said, he cold-emailed people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk asking for advice and mentorship on how to succeed in tech, but never received much of a response. With no real options, Shevchenko decided to build his own.

Omi already has a product called “Personas” that allows you to plug in someone’s X handle and create a bot that takes on their social media persona. When Shevchenko shares his screen with me, it shows that he has been communicating with artificial intelligence Elon Musk for a long time. “It helps me understand what I need to work on tomorrow,” Shevchenko says. “Or when I’m talking to someone and I don’t know the answer to a question, I get a little nudge—sometimes that tells me I’m wrong!” His wearable device heard him say he was sick a few days ago and has been reminding him to get more rest ever since. He asks him to give him feedback every month and tell him how to do better.

He gets many notifications from the Omi app, including during our call, and not all of them make sense – one was simply a transcription of a sentence he had said a minute earlier. Shevchenko admits it’s still early, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the system’s failings. The connection works for him.

However, most people won’t use Omi in this way. The product will begin rolling out widely in the second quarter of this year, but Shevchenko says 5,000 people with an early version of the device are using it to remember things, look up information and perform other tasks common to AI assistants.

In this sense, Omi has a lot in common with devices like Limitless Accessories, and bears a striking resemblance to another wearable called Friend. When Friend launched last yearShevchenko claimed Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann stole his work, and the ensuing debate included everything from sniping at X to freestyle rap diss track. In fact, Omi was called Friend for a time, and Shevchenko says he changed the name both to avoid confusion and because Schiffmann lost $1.8 million on Friend.com and subsequently dominated search results.

Shevchenko is confident that Omi will be able to improve other devices. All of Omi’s code is open source, and there are already 250 apps in the store. Omi’s plan is to be a big, broad platform, not a specific device or app – the device itself is just one piece of the puzzle. The company uses OpenAI and Meta models to support Omi so it can develop the product itself more quickly.

Despite all the problems and underlying issues, it is clear that AI models are already quite good. feel like a real friend to millions of people. You can look at it however you like, but from Omi and Friend to Character.AI and Replicas, bot friends quickly become true friends. In this case, they want both more information about you and more ways to help you. Omi believes the first answer is an always-on microphone, and the second answer is the app store. Then I think comes the brain.