San Francisco-based startup Hardware has announced the launch of a new AI wearable, the waterto boost productivity during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The device can be worn as a necklace where Omi's AI assistant can be activated by saying “Hey Omi”. The startup also claims that Omi can be attached to the side of your head, using medical tape, and use a “brain interface” to understand when you're talking to it.
The startup's founder, Nick Shevchenko, began marketing the device on Kickstarter as the “Friend,” but later changed the device's name. Another San Francisco hardware maker has launched its own Friend device and bought the domain name for $1.8 million.
In recent years, we have seen an explosion of devices that use AI as their main interface The Rabbit was launched during last year's CES and has generated quite a bit of buzz as a potential replacement for your smartphone. The Humane, Friend, and Ray-Ban Metas are some of the other AI devices released in the last few years that tried to show what a new era of consumer hardware could look like. However, none of these AI devices lived up to their initial hype.
Shevchenko, a Thiel colleague with a history of eye-popping stunts, is taking a slightly different approach with Omi. Rather than seeing the device as a smartphone replacement or AI companion, he wants Omi to be a complementary device to your phone that boosts your productivity.
The Omi device itself is a small, round orb that looks like it fell out of a pack of Mentos. The consumer version costs $89 and will begin shipping in the second quarter of 2025. However, you can order a developer version for roughly $70 for delivery.
The underlying hardware says the Omi device can answer your questions, summarize your conversations, create to-do lists and help schedule meetings. The device is constantly listening and playing your conversation through GPT-4o, and it can also remember the context to give personalized advice to each user.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Shevchenko said he understands that there may be privacy concerns with a device that can be heard all the time. That's why he built Omi into an open-source platform where users can see where their data is going or choose to store it locally.
Omi's open source platform allows developers to build their own applications or use AI models of their choice. Shevchenko said developers have already created more than 250 apps in Omi's app store.
Shevchenko said Based Hardware raised roughly $700,000 and spent $150,000 of that on promotional videos Omi shot in Los Angeles. The founder of the startup said that he helped direct the videos himself. He says the startup is in talks to raise more capital after this launch, but Shevchenko has no doubts about spending that much on marketing.
“For us, the user base is actually the key driver of the product. The more people know about us, the better the product will be because we built on this open source platform,” said Shevchenko.
It's unclear whether Omi's “brain interface” actually works, but the startup is tackling fairly simple use cases to get started. Shevchenko wants his device to understand whether a user is talking to Omi, without using a wake-up call. (TechCrunch was not able to test this for ourselves at this time).
But in a demo shared with TechCrunch, Shevchenko uses the brain interface by closing his eyes and asking “Can you tell me about TechCrunch?” Omir wakes up without using any words. While his eyes were closed, Shevchenko said he was focusing very hard on the device next to his head. The device then offered a summary of TechCrunch and told Shevchenko how the publication would be relevant to his upcoming launch.
When Avi Schiffman launched Friends last summer, Shevchenko released a diss track on X Claims his device as a “real friend”. Shevchenko now claims that Omi is a different kind of product than Friend, but he says Omi has an app in the App Store that does exactly what Friend does.