Week in voice AI #11: Ring or pendant?
My precious
I am Ivan Mehta, a consumer tech reporter at TechCrunch. For more than a year, I have covered different aspects of voice AI. This newsletter is an experimental attempt at covering what is happening in this industry, which is growing at a rapid pace.
Hardware notetakers in demand: Sandbar raises $23 million, Taya raises $5 million
In 2024, “AI gadgets,” like Humane and Rabbit, took the world by storm. While the initial hype was a lot, Humane ended up being acquired by HP, and Rabbit hasn’t progressed the way it might have wanted to. Come 2026, companies seem to be chasing voice as a modality to power their devices.
Voice-led devices aren’t exactly a new trend. We have seen pendants like Friend, Omi, Limitless, and Bee. Some of them didn’t take off, and some got acquired by companies like Meta and Amazon.
Last week, there were two startups that were trying to make the category more fashionable and got new funding. The first was Sandbar, a startup by former Meta employees, which is trying to make a notetaking ring called Stream, and got $23 million in Series A funding. The second startup was former Apple design engineer’s compay called Taya, which is trying to make a notetaker in the form of jewelry with a pendant, and got $5 million in funding.
Sandbar announced its ring and demoed it during a few sessions in the U.S. last year. The device looks promising in photos. It has a touch pad on one side, so it is ideal to wear it on the index finger and use your thumb to operate. The company got investor interest after its announcement and wanted to build out its machine learning team, resulting in a new round led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.
The ring can also act as a media controller and will let you play/pause, skip tracks, and control volume. The form factor is promising as motion of using almost a pinch-like action to take notes or control media seems a natural way to interact with a device.
On one hand, the company is working on handling noise in different environments and having different kinds of speech-to-text models work with its firmware. On the other hand, the company is ambitious about what it wants to do with the captured data. As a first step, it is thinking about how to present notes and surface information to users better. Long term, Sandbar wants to build some agentic workflows, just like meeting note-taking apps, using the captured data.
Taya is taking a fashionable route with its pendant to appeal to a wider demographic, especially women. As compared to Sandbar’s $249 Stream ring, Taya’s $89 pendant is cheaper. The pendant will have a button for users to record their thoughts, and the company is also working on giving them a feedback mechanism to help users understand that their note was captured.
The company said that it also records a short snippet of voice during onboarding to understand the user’s voice and prioritize it during the conversation.
There is a form factor differentiation between these two companies that are trying to make AI voice gadgets appeal to a more widespread audience by the way of making the gadgets fashionable. The likes of Plaud, Omi, and Neosapien have had their audience rooted in the tech and startup world. Sandbar and Taya are thinking of going beyond them to make their products appeal to creatives by molding a voice gadget into a fashionable everyday object.
For both startups, a privacy-first approach stands out. In talking to users, both felt that there is a need and a want for a device that is not always on and only records when users want.
The initial interest is promising for these startups, but they have yet to ship batches to consumers. Long-term success and social acceptance of these gadgets will depend on when consumers want to buy them and can buy them quickly. Users will have a choice of one form factor over another, but they would first have to be convinced that a hardware device to note their musings while they take a walk or do chores is the right thing for them. The way that I see things, I am convinced that we will see more voice gadgets.
Quick bytes
AI actor Tinny Norwood released a four-minute song called “Take the lead,” and it’s pretty bad.
ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said that the company has more than 10,000 voices in its marketplace.
Emarbk Studio CEO Patrick Söderlund told GamesIndustry.biz that the gaming studio re-recorded some AI bits in its game Arc Raiders with professional actors. He said the quality the studio got out of professional actors was better.
Agora launches new conversational AI agents for sales and marketing.
AI customer support startup Wolderful raises $150 million in new funding led by Insight Partners.
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Have a suggestion for a new piece of hardware I can check out?
Email: voiceaiweek@gmail.com or im@ivanmehta.com