Sandbar, a startup co-founded by former Meta employees Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, has unveiled its innovative smart ring called Stream. This powerful little device helps you quickly record your ideas and easily voice record notes. It even allows you to play and pause music, making your AI interactions even more lifelike. The startup expects to start shipping the Stream next summer after opening pre-orders.
CEO Mina Fahmi has extensive experience in designing human-computer interfaces. A few years ago she created an experimental app for journaling. This was around the time when large language models began to really take off. This background has significantly influenced the design and functionality of Stream, which features an AI chatbot that converses with users as they document their thoughts.
Kirak Hong, Sandbar’s CTO, has a similarly impressive pedigree. He was formerly at Google and later at CTRL-Labs, where he first coincided with Fahmi. Following the acquisition of CTRL-Labs by Meta in 2019, the company made significant progress developing neural interfaces for the tech giant’s upcoming smart wearables. This deep expertise from both founders has informed Sandbar’s overall vision as well as product development.
Stream has unique capabilities that differentiate it from other comparable applications such as Wispr Flow and Willow. Perhaps most significantly, it introduces a layer of personalization. With this powerful feature, you can make the AI assistant’s voice sound similar to your end-user’s voice. This new programming focus seeks to increase the quality of the user experience. Magic happens when a product begins to feel personal and human.
Along with capturing audio reflections, Stream’s app has a distinctive pinch-to-zoom experience. This encourages students to be able to look back at entire conversations spread over days or weeks, and see the arcs of their thinking represented. By preordering the app you’ll get early access to the app and your three-month Pro subscription for free! From then on out, it’s $10 a month. This tier comes with unlimited chats and notes as well as early access to new features.
The mission-driven company has so far raised $13 million in venture funding from investors like True Ventures, Upfront Ventures and Betaworks. This fiscal support puts Sandbar in a strong position to launch Stream successfully into the marketplace.
Pre-orders for Stream will begin on Wednesday. The silver version is $249 and the gold version runs $299. The team believes that adding Stream will fill a huge hole in the current market. It will minimize devices that only allow distracting or noisy thought capture, no more needing a smartphone or laptop to record everything.
“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,” – Mina Fahmi
At the time, prominent investor Toni Schneider expressed his enthusiasm for the potential of combining voice technology with artificial intelligence. I think a lot of people would agree that voice and AI are like peanut butter and jelly. They figure that for somebody sitting in front of an AI on a phone or laptop that might be just too much. Really, all you need is your voice! As a result, there really ought to be a new form factor floating around. We considered hundreds of them, and hundreds of them just missed the mark. Now that Mina was on board and demoing the product, it all clicked.