We’ve all been struck by a jolt of inspiration at the most inopportune moment, only to have the brilliant idea slip away before it can be jotted down. A new voice-recording wearable could ensure that never happens again.
Launched on Kickstarter earlier this month, Senstone is a compact brooch-sized device designed to capture your spur-of-the-moment thoughts at the tap of a button, transferring them to a companion app on your smartphone. But it doesn’t stop there: the device’s real potential is in its purported automatic-transcription feature, which takes your voice memos and turn them into text you can edit and share.
The wearable can be pinned to your shirt’s collar, worn as a pendant, or attached to a wrist strap. Just tap the gadget and start talking to start recording; tap again to stop.
Recordings are immediately synced to the app and uploaded to the cloud, and that’s where AI tech takes over, converting the memos into text, extracting keywords and analyzing speech patterns – at least that’s the idea.
When the gadget ships in July, Senstone’s makers claim it will allow its wearers to store up to 50 hours of notes in the cloud and transcribe 300 one-minute-long transactions per month — but those numbers could shift based on what the company learns about its users’ habits. It’ll even have integrations with note-taking a productivity apps like Everynote and Trello.
The gadget will have some limited functionality when your smartphone is out of range. You’ll still be able to record up to two and a half hours of your most isolated thoughts, stored on the device itself. It’ll sync the recordings to the cloud when it reconnects.
The Senstone is designed to do one thing and one thing only, so you won’t be getting any additional wearable features like step counts or phone notifications.
At launch, the device is projected to support transcription for 11 languages, with more in the works. With a premium subscription to the companion app, you’ll likely be able to unlock more AI features, like automatic punctuation and noise analysis, expand your cloud storage capacity for audio notes and have access to more speech-to-text transactions.
According to Senstone’s Kickstarter campaign page, it has a tentative release in September (but early birds can snag one two months early in July, if the campaign is funded and the production stays on track). Until then, we’ll just have to keep on taking notes the old-fashioned way and hope no brilliant ideas go unrecorded.
