A raft of voice-based hardware devices have emerged, aimed at companionship, productivity, or personal growth. These include card-shaped devices from Plaud and Pocket; pendants from Friend, Limitless, and Taya; and a wristband from Bee, which is now part of Amazon.
Now, two former Meta employees who worked on interface design have launched Sandbar, a startup that has created a ring called Stream for similar purposes. The company calls the ring “a mouse for voice” because it can take notes, help you interact with an AI assistant, and also let you control music.
Sandbar’s CEO, Mina Fahmi, has an extensive background in designing human-computer interfaces. He worked at Bryan Johnson’s Kernel and later at smart glasses startup Magic Leap. Kirak Hong, Sandbar’s CTO, worked at Google before joining CTRL-Labs, where the duo met. Meta acquired the startup in 2019, and its work eventually led to neural interfaces for the tech giant’s smart wearables.
Sandbar co-founders Kirak Hong and Mina Fahmi Image Credits: Sandbar
Fahmi said that when large language models started emerging a few years ago, he built an experimental journaling app. However, he found that the app itself became a barrier to capturing his thoughts. Given his experience building hardware interfaces, he began exploring a conversational hardware interface instead.
“A lot of my ideas bubble up when I’m walking or when I’m commuting, and I don’t want to pull out my phone to interrupt that moment. I don’t want to shout into my earbuds where the world can hear me to talk through an idea. Kirak and I were trying to understand what it would take to actually capture a thought the moment it bubbles up. That’s how we came up with Stream,” Fahmi told TechCrunch in an interview.
Image Credits: Sandbar
The ring, designed to be worn on your dominant hand’s index finger, has microphones and a touch pad.
In a virtual demo, Fahmi wore the Stream ring on his index finger and recorded his thoughts by pressing and holding the touchpad. By default, the microphone is off, activating only with this gesture. The microphone proved sensitive enough to pick up whispers and transcribe them in the companion iOS app. Other apps like Wispr Flow and Willow similarly allow people to capture their thoughts quietly.
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