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There’s a new AI companion in town. Just don’t call it that. Launching today, Stream Ring is a wearable device that lets you capture your thoughts, brainstorm ideas, prepare for an interview, orif you’re the company CTO’s 7-year-old childsimply learn about dinosaurs. The ring, which comes in silver ($249) and gold ($299), with a black resin contour on the inside, is available to preorder now, with shipping to begin in summer 2026. It only listens when you press and hold on its miniature touchpad, a bit like a walkie-talkie. You wear it on your index finger, raise it to your lips when you want to save that brilliant idea you just had, or find a quick recipe for Japanese eggplants, and press to record. [Image: Sandbar] The ring confirms it’s listening with a gentle haptic vibration, then transcribes your thoughts onto an accompanying app. Unlike the much-reviled Friend AI pendant, which types answers to your query on its app, Stream Ring talks back into your earbuds, while also saving its answer into the app. The ultimate goal? To help you bridge the gap between your thoughts and your words. [Photo: Sandbar] A more intimate information-ecosystem? Stream Ring was designed by Sandbar, a New York-based startup that calls itself an interface company”an intentionally vague description that is intended not box in its founders’ ambitions. It was cofounded by Mina Fahmi (CEO) and Kirak Hong (CTO), who first met at CTRL-Labs, the neural band startup that was later acquired by Meta. Kirak Hong and Mina Fahmi [Photo: Sandbar] Fahmi defines an interface as the point where two disparate things become one. “When we say ‘interface company,’ we mean that we will do whatever it takes to bridge gaps,” he says. In the case of Stream Ring, that gap in question is the one preventing people from fully expressing themselves. The challenge could stem from UX friction: it takes a lot of work to dig up your phone in the middle of a dog walk, and pull up your voice memos app to record your fleeting thought. It could also stem from social norms: would you really pull out a phone in the middle of a buzzing coffee shop to record a deeply private matter? The way Sandbar has packaged the experience into a ring could solve for both of these pain points. During a recent demo at Sandbar offices, in Manhattan, I was seduced by the immediacy of the interaction: bringing a hand to our mouth is a natural gesture that many of us do without even realizing it. And the act of covering your mouth with your hand promises built-in intimacy. The bigger question right now, as it pertains to AI, is: who will this benefit? [Photo: Sandbar] The AI hardware crisis AI hardware is having a bit of an existential moment. After years of promises about tech that would quietly live in the background of our lives, most of the products that tried to make AI feel ever-present have either stumbled or disappeared. The Humane AI Pin was hypped as a screenless smartphone replacement before it flopped under the weight of its own ambition and a $699 price tag. The Friend pendant, which billed itself as a minimalist companion for capturing spontaneous thoughts, has been criticized for being more gimmick than breakthrough. The question hanging over all of this is whether AI wearables can justify their existence beyond novelty, or whether these AI gadgets are still searching for the problem theyre meant to solve. Whether Stream Ring ends up sitting inside this shaky ecosystem or at the edge of it will largely depend on how it’s perceived by the general public. That the founders are shying away from calling it an AI companion suggests they know how fraught the term can be. Instead of foisting yet another AI-powered device onto a tech-hungry audience, they are marketing themselves to the curious, introspective, creative types who like to live an examined life. As someone who keeps obsessive notes about story ideas and various characters I meet on the subway, I can see the appeal of a device that eliminates the friction that comes with most note-taking apps. I also appreciate the ring’s ability to meet me where I am, which is usually somewhere, listening to music. If a hought bubbles up mid-song, pressing on the ring’s touchpad will pause the music, and capture my voice, before resuming the music. I can also hit pause, skip a track, and control the volume all with a few very intuitive gestures on the touchpad. If Stream’s AI goes off track, or says something I need clarified immediately, I can also interrupt it mid-sentence. “We find that really changes the dynamic from one of a companion or an assistant to something that is an extension of you that’s fully in your control,” says Fahmi. [Photo: Sandbar] Stream ring as an extension of yourself A large part of the ring’s promise comes from the AI’s voice itself. Unlike Siri or Alexa, which let you select from a predetermined number of voices, Stream Ring models its voice on your own voice by creating a voice doppelgänger of sorts. After reading a linguistics passage that covers a wide range of sounds and sound combinations found in English, I was startled to hear an oddly familiar voice talk back at me. The experience felt like talking to my alter-egoa version of me that felt, as Stream Ring put it to me when I asked what it thought of being my voice twin, “like being my echo.” “We found that it’s best for the voice to be either identical, or 80% similar, and we shoot for 80% similar,” Fahmi told me. (Most people who have tested the ring so far choose to keep the inner voice.) The effect, though disconcerting at first, is meant to emulate self-talk, which should facilitate self-discovery. “I think when you’re building a computer, it’s easy to say, let’s just connect humans to computers better,” says Hong. “That’s one way to think about it and that’s part of our mission, but the bigger part of our journey, I believe, is when you start to talk with yourself. I hope we get to know ourselves better.” While scrolling through previous notes he took on the Stream app, for example, Hong was surprised to learn how much he talks about gardening. “I get to know what I really care about,” he says. [Photo: Sandbar] The future of Stream Fahmi and Hong launched Sandbar in 2023. Two years in the making, the ring first began as a prototype roughly the size of matchbox. It had a mic, a button, and a “very poorly wired computer inside,” says Fahmi with a laugh. The next iteration looked like an adjustable ring that you could press to tighten around your finger, but it was still too bulky. The current version is much more elegant, though it remains quite visibly a “smart ring” that you probably couldn’t disguise as jewelry. For now, the device works best online, though offline features are in the pipeline. The version that I tested has general knowledge pulled from the internet, but no deep knowledge or internet lookup abilities that would allow anyone to go into a rabbit hole about, say, black holes. On the flip side, it is 100% accurate and it does not hallucinate. The Stream Ring’s “personality” was designed to be curious, compassionate, and concise. Unlike most current LLMs, which are prone to flattery, Stream was designed to sound like you are bouncing off a thought you just had in your head versus talking to a person you just met. Naturally, then, every Stream Ring might behave a little differently, based on the information it gleans from its user. Fahmi says his ring sometimes pushes back on what he says, but it mostly sounds like him, “because it’s sharing my experience.” By contrast, when he was listening to the way an investor’s ring responded back to him, he found the ring was “way sharper with him.” It’s still too early to tell if people will embrace interacting with AI with the fervor investors expect. (Sandbar has raised $13 million in venture capital so far.) If I were writing a dystopia, I would envision a world in which, comforted by the shield of an AI entity that doesn’t judge or ghost you, humans retreat into tech bubbles and forget to talk to one another. A utopia, meanwhile, might find people, recently endowed with the self-knowledge of an expanded mind, taking life by the horns. The hope, of course, is that more people resonate with the latter category than the former, though more likely than not, reality will oscillate between the two. When asked if the device might encourage isolation and an over-reliance on technology, Hong says that, as a father of two, he wants to make an AI product that is safe, useful, but also meaningful to his kids. “My son loves talking [to his ring] about dinosaurs, but that doesn’t mean he never comes back to me and talks about the dinosaurs he’s just learned,” he says. “He still loves the eye contact.”
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E-Commerce
Like every company in the world, Pantone thinks you really need AI help to do your job. Unlike most companies, however, the people who created the esperanto of color matching might have actually developed something useful. Today, Pantone is announcing a generative AI model that can automatically create a color palette. It was trained in-house on six decades of proprietary color research papers and articles, which is now available in Pantone Connect’s extension for Adobe apps. I don’t know if designers will be into the idea of chatting with an AI to find their new product’s color palette, but according to Pantone, many are eagerly waiting for such a helper. “We observed that palettes are critical to designers and that creating palettes is a pain point for many designers in that it is, you know, time-consuming,” says Ora Solomon, Pantone’s VP of Product and Engineering. “There isn’t like a one-stop shop for inspiration. [Image: Pantone] The system works like any other chat-based AI: Write a prompt with whatever you have in mind and you will get a color palette ready to go, along with a rationale that explains the palette and links to support the AI suggestion. Once you have this document, which looks like an executive summary with a line of color swatches on the top, you can refine it with further prompts just like you do with most chat-based AIs. The genesis of the new Pantone Palette Generator was a practical alignment of corporate strategy and customer needs, Solomon tells me. “Pantone is owned by a parent company called Veralto. Veralto has a technology strategic partnership with Microsoft,” Solomon explains, setting the stage for the collaboration. [Image: Pantone] A first step Solomon says that they developed the tool around a chat experience because it seemed like the easiest, most popular way to interact with AI. “Chat-based assistants are becoming increasingly Be it in regular workflows, be it in just overall everyday life,” she says. The most significant aspect of the tool is not the interface, which looks exactly like any other LLM chat system, but the information that powers that LLM. “One thing I want to call out about these palettes is that these are essentially Pantone curated palettes,” Solomon says. “They are based on extensive, many years worth of research, of trend forecasting, of articles on data that our Pantone Color Institute has developed really since our inception. While Pantone trained the model using Microsoft’s tech stack, they only used their own data. “We have not gone to third-party sources for this,” Solomon says. “It was really important to us that the palettes that we generate are truly informed and based on our own data. [Image: Pantone] Solomon says that the Pantone model will be updated regularly as new research and articles come out. The next update, in fact, will happen when the famous Pantones Color of the Year comes out next month. This closed-data approach has already prompted a specific reaction from designers who experienced the tool at last weeks Adobe MAX, she says. “What particularly resonated was the fact that it is based on Pantone data and Pantone research,” she says. “And one particular user called it, ‘oh, so it’s ethical AI,’ which I thought was a very interesting reaction. As a beta, Solomon says this is just the beginning for the Palette Generator. “We will continue iterating on it based on how we see usage and what feedback we get from our users, she says. So go try it and see. The generator is now available to all Pantone Connect users, including those on the free tier.
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E-Commerce
Pinterest, a platform Futurism described as being strangled by AI slop, is not having a great day. The image-based social media company yesterday released its third-quarter earnings and, despite a 17% increase in revenue year-over-year (YOY), its shares took a tremendous tumble. Pinterest stock (NYSE: PINS) dropped about 20% through after-hours trading and into premarket on Wednesday, sitting at 18.6% down at the time of publishing. Well get into the AI slop factor, but first its worth noting that Pinterests revenue might have improved YOY, but it only just met Wall Streets expectations of $1.05 billion, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC. Pinterest also missed earnings per share estimates of 42 cents, reaching an adjusted 38 cents instead. Meanwhile, the company predicted its fourth-quarter revenue to reach between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, not exactly comforting to investors when Wall Street had projected the highest end of that range. Pinterest also missed estimated figures for third-quarter sales in the U.S. and Canada ($786 million versus $799 million) and global average revenue per user ($1.78 versus $1.79), according to separate consensus estimates cited by CNBC. How does AI factor into Pinterests report? Pinterest released its third-quarter earnings only a couple weeks after rolling out new generative AI controls. Following a sea of user complaints, the new tools allow users to dial down orif they really wantup the level of AI-generated content on their feeds. Users had openly criticized the AI slop, with one person stating on X, I hate how Pinterest is just AI and ads now. Its just unusable.” The post received 21,000 likes. Despite the pushback, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready doubled down on AI in an earnings call, referring to it as the heart of the Pinterest experience. He even went so far as to call Pinterest an AI-powered shopping assistant, further centering AI at the company. The good news for Pinterest Pinterest saw a 12% increase YOY in global monthly active users, reaching 600 million. In July, the company shared that men were joining the platform at record rates, making up over one-third of users. As for the advertisements they see, Ready states that Pinterest has built a performance ads platform that is harnessing our users commercial intent and AI-driven automation to improve performance and simplify campaign creation for advertisers. He goes on to claim that advertiser outbound clicks have improved by 40% YOY. In response to a question from an analyst about Pinterest’s new AI controls, Ready further addressed the complex issue of identifying AI-generated content, claiming that no platform could catch 100% of uses. That’s why we say see less, not see none of, because the ability to precisely spot that is not perfect for any platform, he said on the call. He then made the case that AI will eventually follow in the footsteps of Photoshop and play at least a small part in editing most, if not all, content.
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E-Commerce
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