Nick Shevchenko closed his eyes and began to concentrate carefully. They've spent the last half hour telling me about their new product, an $89 wearable Omi Who can listen to your conversation, summarize and get information from it. Now he wants to show me the future. So his eyes are closed, and he's focusing all his attention on the round white puck stuck to his left temple with medical tape. (Did I mention he has this thing on his face all the time? It's very distracting.)
“Hey, what do you think?” The VergeLike a news media website?” Shevchenko does not ask anyone in particular. Then he waits. About fifteen seconds later, a notification comes up on his phone, with some AI-generated information about how reputable and awesome the news source is. The Verge Is. Shevchenko is thrilled, and perhaps a little relieved. The device read her brain waves to understand that he was talking to her, not me, and answered her question without any prompting or change.
So far, that's all the brain-computer-interface functions Omi can do. And it seems quite delicate. “It just senses one channel,” he says, “it's one electrode.” What it's trying to create is a device that understands when you're talking to it and when you're not. And then finally understands and saves your ideas, which Shevchenko describes as pure science fiction and says that maybe in two years it will be possible. Whenever that happens, he thinks it could change the way you use AI tools.
For now, the real purpose of the Omi is pretty simple: It's an always-listening device (the battery apparently lasts three days on a single charge) that you wear on a lanyard around your neck that lets you track your Can help make sense of day-to-day life. It doesn't have a wake word, but you can still talk to it directly because it's always on. Think of it as 80 percent companion and 20 percent Alexa assistant.
Omi can summarize a meeting or conversation and give you action items. This may give you information – Shevchenko spontaneously expressed surprise about the price of Bitcoin during our conversation and a few seconds later received a notification from the Omi companion app with a reply. There's also an Omi App Store, which developers are already using to plug audio input into things like Zapier and Google Drive.
However, for Shevchenko herself, Omi is a personal mentor above all else. “I was born on an island near Japan,” he tells me, “and he always wanted access to the tech visionaries he grew up admiring. He says that for years he sent cold emails to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk asking for tips and advice on how to move forward in technology, but he never got much of a response. With no alternative in real life, Shevchenko decided to create his own.
Omi already has a product called “Persona,” which allows you to plug in anyone's X handle and create a bot that assumes their social network persona. When Shevchenko shares his screen with me, it turns out he's been chatting with AI Elon Musk for a long time. “It helps me understand what I need to work on tomorrow,” Shevchenko says. “Or when I'm talking to someone and I don't know the answer to the question, it will give me a little shock – it sometimes tells me I'm wrong!” His wearable device heard him saying he was sick a few days ago and has since been reminding him to rest more. He asks it every month to give feedback and ways to improve.
he gets one Very Notifications came through the Omi app, including our calls, and not all of them meant anything special – one was just a transcription of a sentence he'd said a minute earlier. Shevchenko admits it's early, but he doesn't seem concerned about mistakes in the system. Communication works for him.
However, most people won't use Omi this way. The product will ship widely in the second quarter of this year, but Shevchenko says the 5,000 people with an early version of the device are using it to help remember things, look up information, and perform other tasks common to AI assistants. Have been.
In that sense, the Omi has a lot in common with devices like the Limitless Pendant and it has a lot in common with another wearable device called the Friend. When? Friend was launched last yearShevchenko claimed that Friend's CEO Avi Shiffman was stealing her work, and the subsequent beef included everything from taking a dig at a freestyle rap diss trackOmi was actually called Friends for some time, and Shevchenko says he changed the name to avoid confusion and because Shiffman made $1.8 million. mitra.com And subsequently dominated the search results.
Shevchenko is confident Omi can improve on those other tools. All of Omi's code is open source, and there are already 250 apps in the store. Omi plans to build a larger, broader platform rather than a specific device or app — the device itself is only one piece of the puzzle. The company is using OpenAI and Meta's models to power Omi, so it can work on the product more quickly.
For all their issues and inherent concerns, it's clear that AI models are already quite good feeling like a true partner To millions of people. You can feel however you want about it, but from Omi and Friend to Character.AI and Replika, bot friends are fast becoming real friends. So again, they need more information about you and more ways to help you. Omi thinks the first answer is an always-on microphone, and the second is an app store. Then, I guess, comes the brain.