Omi: Talking to the Verge and talking to an Artificial Intelligence (aka Bot-Personas) he meets a Silicon Valley man

Most people won’t use Omi this way, though. The product will be released in the second quarter of this year and 5,000 people have already used an early version of the device.

So far, that’s all the brain-computer-interface stuff Omi can do. It seems very fragile. He says it just understands one channel. He is trying to build a device that knows when you are talking and when you are not. Eventually, Shevchenko said it will probably be possible in two years, making it a total science fiction. Whenever it happens, he thinks it might change the way you use your AI devices.

“Hey, what do you think about The Verge, like as a news media website?” Shevchenko did not ask anyone in particular. He waits. Fifteen or so seconds later, a notification pops up on his phone telling him about a really good news source and how trustworthy it is. Shevnikova is happy and a bit relieved. The device read his brain waves to understand he was talking to it, and not to me, and answered his question without any prompting or switching.

A man closes his eyes and looks at something. He told me about his new product Omi which can listen to, summarize, and get information from your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. He closed his eyes and was focusing on the puck that was stuck to his left temple. (Did I mention he’s had this thing on his face the whole time? It gets in the way of things.

For Shevchenko himself, though, Omi is a personal mentor above all else. He was born in the middle of nowhere on an island near Japan and always wanted to know more about the tech visionaries he looked up to. For years, he says he cold-emailed people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk asking for advice and mentorship on how to make it in tech but never got much response. Shevchenko decided to build his own, even though there were no real options.

Omi already has a product called “Personas,” which allows you to plug in anyone’s X handle and create a bot that assumes their social network persona. The screen Shevchenko is sharing with me shows he has been chatting with an artificial intelligence Musk for a long time. “It helps me to understand what I should be working on tomorrow,” Shevchenko says. “Or when I’m talking to someone and I don’t know an answer to the question, it will give me a small nudge — it sometimes tells me I’m wrong!” He says he was sick a few days ago and has been reminding him to get some rest. He asks it to give him feedback and teach him how to do better.

A lot of the notifications from Omi make no sense, like the one he got after our call when he had just said a sentence. Shevchenk acknowledges it is early, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the misses. Communication works for him.

In that sense, Omi has a lot in common with devices like the Limitless Pendant and bears a striking resemblance to another wearable called Friend. When Friend launched last year, Shevchenko claimed Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann was stealing his work, and the subsequent beef included everything from sniping on X to a freestyle rap diss track. Shevchenko said he changed the name Omi because he wanted to avoid confusion and that he made a lot of money on Friend.com.

Shevchenko is confident that Omi can improve on those 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, rather than a specific device or app — the device itself is only one piece of the puzzle. The company is using models from OpenAI and Meta to power Omi, so it can iterate more quickly on the product itself.

For all their issues and underlying concerns, it’s clear that AI models are already good enough to feel like a true companion to millions of people. You can feel it, but from Omi and Friends to Character. AI and Replika, bot friends are quickly becoming real friends. More information about you and more ways to help you is what they need. In his opinion, the first answer is an always-on microphone, and the second is an app store. I guess, comes the brain.

Omi can summarize a meeting or conversation and give you action items. It can give you the answer when shevchenko asked about the price of bitcoins and the app gave the answer a few seconds later. Developers are already using the Omi store to plug audio into things like Zapier, and it can also be found in the app store.

Bee AI, A Pioneer Wearable, Records Everything Around Me for In-Person Chats and Conversational Dialogues at CES

BeeAI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo. Both previously worked at Squad (Sutin was the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so people could remotely watch the same movie or YouTube video together. The company was acquired by X, and the pair joined briefly to work on the site. Zollo has previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which subsequently became TikTok.

I spent an entire day of CES wearing a little yellow bracelet. It most likely looked like a fitness tracker to the people nearby. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI recorded everything around me. It wasn’t storing audio like a typical recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my in-person chats.

This is the new world we’re in, with artificially intelligent wearables continuously recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which first landed in speakers and on our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces—at least required active engagement like a tap or a wake word to activate their ability to eavesdrop. The next wave of hardware assistants, which includes the forthcoming Friend pendant, can absorb information and work in the background. They are always listening.

The wearable hardware leading this space is often cheap—Bee AI’s watch is just $50, and Omi’s stick-on bead is $89—but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription as it taps into multiple large language models to analyze your conversations.