Ring maker Sandbar says voice control is the future of AI wearables
Startup Sandbar, maker of the private voice ring Stream, has raised $36 million in total funding. Its CEO argues that keeping humans in control of recording is key to making wearable AI devices succeed.
Over the past couple of years, AI notetaking hardware has surged in popularity, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture meetings and convert them into summaries and action items.
Now a new wave of wearables, rings in particular, is trying to capture a different use case: stray thoughts and ideas people want to record on the go. One of the companies pursuing this opportunity is Sandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring called Stream.
Significant funding raised
Sandbar has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A round led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.
Keeping humans in control
On an episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, journalist Rebecca Bellan spoke with Sandbar co-founder and CEO Mina Fahmi. He discussed why he believes many earlier voice hardware devices failed to gain traction before Stream came along.
Fahmi argued that for wearable technology to succeed, it's essential that the human user remains firmly in control of the device's recording function, rather than having it passively and continuously capture everything around them. He sees this human-controlled approach as the key factor needed for voice wearables to finally achieve wider adoption.
