Gadgets

After rebooting the Pebble smartwatch, founder Eric Migicovsky is expanding his company’s device lineup with a new smart wearable: an AI-powered smart ring known as Index 01. Named for the finger where the ring is meant to be worn, the new $75 ring is not meant to be a competitor to the always-on, always-listening AI devices, like the AI pendant Friend, but instead offers a way to record quick notes and reminders with a press of a button on the ring’s side.

AI only comes into play via the open source, speech-to-text, and AI models that run locally on your smartphone, via the open source Pebble mobile app. That is, if the Ring’s button is not being pressed, it’s not recording. (And this is a press-and-hold gesture, too, which means you can’t start the ring’s recording and then let go to surreptitiously record a conversation.)

You can wear the stainless steel ring while in the shower, washing hands, doing dishes, or in the rain, but you would have to take it off for other water-related activities, like swimming. At launch, it’s water-resistant to 1 meter.

The ring is also not a fitness tracker or sleep monitor. It doesn’t record details about your heart rate or health. And it’s not there to be your AI friend.

“I’m not trying to build some AI assistant thing,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch in an interview. “I build things that solve one main problem, and they solve it really well,” he explains. “I think of [the ring] as external memory for my brain…that’s what this is. It’s always with you.”

Plus, the ring has been designed to be highly reliable and privacy-preserving, he says, as all your thoughts are stored on your phone, not in the cloud. There is no subscription.

Migicovsky has been wearing the ring for three months now and says he cannot imagine going back to a world where he doesn’t always have a memory device with him.

“The problem is that, during the day, I get ideas or I remember something, and if I don’t write it down that second, I forget it,” he says. The ring solves this problem, he adds, without becoming another device you need to charge.

“The battery lasts for years,” Migicovsky claims.

Technically, the ring is said to support roughly 12 to 14 hours of recording. On average, the founder says he uses it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. At that rate, he’ll get about two years of usage. When the ring’s battery dies, you can ship it back to the company for recycling.

When using Index, you can record up to five minutes of audio, which can be saved to the ring and synced to your phone later. This makes sense for recording briefer, personal thoughts and notes, even when you don’t have your phone handy, but it wouldn’t work for recording a longer chat, like a presentation, meeting, or in-person interview of some kind.

The ring also supports 99+ languages and has a bit of on-device memory, in case you’re not in Bluetooth range of your device, where the recording is ultimately saved and transcribed. (The raw audio is retained, too, in case the speech-to-text is garbled due to loud background noise).

If you own a Pebble smartwatch or one from another brand, your recorded thought can even appear on the watch’s screen so you can verify it’s correct.

The ring works with Pebble’s mobile app, which offers notes and reminders, but can optionally integrate with your phone’s calendaring system, too, or other apps, like Notion. And the ring’s software is open source, which makes it hackable by the community, the founder points out.

Because of its open nature, the ring’s button is already programmable. In addition to the press-and-hold gesture, you can program the ring to do other things with a single or double press, like play or pause your music or control the shutter on your phone’s camera. You could use it to send a message through the universal chat app Beeper, which Migicovsky also created, or you could add your own voice actions via MCP.

A new approach to hardware

Migicovsky acknowledges that hardware can be difficult to get right — as the previous exit of Pebble to Fitbit showed. (Fitbit, too, was later acquired by Google in 2021).

“I didn’t earn any money during Pebble — we exited, but it was not a great exit,” Migicovsky admits.

This year, however, he decided to reboot the Pebble project after Google open sourced the PebbleOS, which opened up the door to new hardware.

With his new company, Core Devices, Migicovsky plans to do things differently.

Still, the founder doesn’t regret his previous choices, he clarifies.

“I wouldn’t have gone back and changed anything. I loved what we built. I loved what we did. I love the company that we built, but it’s not the only way to build a company,” he told TechCrunch. ” And, speaking as an ex-YC partner, there are — there’s a time and a place for building a venture-backed startup. Some companies are phenomenal when they raise money and build a big team, and I tried that…I think what I’m doing now is trying an alternative path, which is [to] start from profitability,” he says.

The new company is a small team of five, self-funded, and focused on sustainability.

So far, Core Devices has shipped the Pebble 2 Duo smartwatch with a black-and-white display. Its first run sold out, and the company is now preparing to ship the upgraded version, the Pebble Time 2. The newer device, which has seen 25,000 pre-orders, is a stainless steel watch with a larger, color e-ink screen.

As for the Index 01, the ring’s pre-order offer ends in March 2026. After that, the price increases to $99. It currently comes in silver, polished gold, and matte black and works with iOS and Android devices. Customers can select from eight ring sizes and three colors.