Nik Shevchenko closes his eyes and begins to focus intensely. He's spent the last half hour telling me about his new product, an $89 wearable device called Water so you can listen, summarize, and gain insights from your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. So he has his eyes closed and focuses all his attention on the round white disc taped to his left temple with medical tape. (Did I mention he's had this thing on his face the whole time? It's very distracting.)
“Hey, what do you think about The edgelike a news media website? —Shevchenko asks, addressing no one in particular. Then wait. About fifteen seconds later, a notification appears on your phone, with ai-generated information about how trustworthy and excellent a news source is. The edge is. Shevchenko is excited and perhaps a little relieved. The device read his brain waves to understand that he was speaking to him and not me, and answered his question without any prompting or change.
So far, that's all Omi can do with the brain-computer interface. And it looks quite fragile. “It only understands one channel,” he says, “it's an electrode.” What you're trying to build is a device that understands when you're talking to it and when you're not. And he finally understands and saves his thoughts, which Shevchenko considers total science fiction and says will probably be possible in two years. Whenever this happens, he thinks it could change the way you use your ai devices.
For now, the Omi's real purpose is much simpler: It's an always-listening device (the battery apparently lasts three days on a charge) that you wear with a lanyard around your neck and that can help you make sense of your day. day. life. There's no activation word, but you can still talk to him directly because he's always activated. Think of it as 80 percent companion and 20 percent Alexa assistant.
Omi can summarize a meeting or conversation and give you action items. It can give you information: Shevchenko casually wondered about the price of bitcoin during our conversation and a few seconds later received a notification from the Omi companion app with the answer. There's also an Omi app store, which developers are already using to connect audio input to things like Zapier and Google Drive.
For Shevchenko himself, however, Omi is, above all, a personal mentor. “I was born in the middle of nowhere, on an island near Japan,” he tells me, and I always wanted access to the tech visionaries I admired growing up. For years, he says he sent cold emails to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk asking for advice and mentorship on how to succeed in technology, but never got much of a response. With no options in real life, Shevchenko decided to build her own.
Omi already has a product called “People”, which allows you to connect the x identifier of any person and create a bot that assumes their personality on the social network. When Shevchenko shares his screen with me, it shows that he has been chatting with ai Elon Musk for a long time. “It helps me understand what I should work on tomorrow,” Shevchenko says. “Or when I talk to someone and I don't know the answer to the question, they give me a little push: sometimes they tell me I'm wrong!” Your wearable heard you say you were sick a few days ago and has been reminding you to get more rest ever since. He asks him every month for feedback and how to do it better.
he gets a batch of notifications from the Omi app, even during our call, and not all of them make much sense: one was just a transcription of a phrase I had said a minute earlier. Shevchenko acknowledges it's early, but doesn't seem bothered by the system's glitches. Communication works for him.
However, most people won't use Omi this way. The product will be widely distributed in the second quarter of this year, but Shevchenko says the 5,000 people with an older version of the device are using it to remember things, look up information and perform other tasks common to ai assistants.
In that sense, the Omi has a lot in common with devices like the Limitless Pendant and bears a striking resemblance to another wearable device called Friend. When Friend launched last year, Shevchenko claimed that Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann was stealing his work, and the ensuing beef included everything from attacking x to <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/kodjima33/status/1818452878018646369″>a freestyle rap track. In fact, Omi was called Friend for a time, and Shevchenko says he changed the name to avoid confusion and because Schiffmann spent $1.8 million on it. friend.com and subsequently dominated search results.
Shevchenko is confident that Omi can improve those other devices. All Omi code is open source and there are already 250 apps in the store. Omi's plan is to be a big, broad platform, rather than a specific device or app – the device itself is just one piece of the puzzle. The company is using OpenAI and Meta models to power Omi, so it can iterate more quickly on the product itself.
For all their underlying problems and concerns, it's clear that ai models are already good enough to feel like a true companion for millions of people. You can feel about that however you want, but from Omi and Friend to Character.ai and Replika, bot friends are quickly becoming real friends. So what they need is more information about you and more ways to help you. Omi believes the first answer is an always-on microphone and the second is an app store. Then, I guess, comes the brain.
