A gadget you throw away when the battery runs out is a very dumb idea if you ask me.
Genuinely, is this rage bait?
$100, non replaceable battery, does absolutely nothing besides stream audio recordings to an llm on your phone that is 100% guaranteed to produce a worthless error ridden transcript,
and my personal favorite,
Unlike recording notes with a phone or smartwatch, you don’t need both hands to create voice notes with the Index.
Is this a joke? Why do I need both hands to record a voice note with a phone?
Hey chatgpt, I accidentally made a product to solve a nonexistent problem. What should I say?
TL;DR:
Price:
“Under $100”:
After [the preorder], it will go up to $99.
Battery is not rechargeable:
And what happens when the battery runs out? You just send the ring back to be recycled.
Runtime:
The integrated battery will power the device for 12–14 total hours of recording. The designers estimate that to be roughly two years of usage if you record 10 to 20 short voice notes per day.
- “Roughly two years” = lets say that’s 20 months
- 12 hours = 43.200 seconds = 72 seconds/day
- “10-20 short voice notes” = 3.6-7.2 seconds per note
Features:
- Records only while pressing the button
-
The recording is converted to text and fed into a large language model (LLM) that runs locally on your device to take actions. The speech-to-text process and LLM operate in the open source Pebble app, and no data from your notes is sent to the Internet. However, there is an optional online backup service for your recordings.
-
A model small enough to run on your phone has to focus on specific functionality rather than doing everything like a big cloud-based AI
-
- Create or add to notes
- Set reminder
- Create alarm
- Create timer
- Play/pause/skip music track (via button press)
-
also designed to be hacking-friendly. The audio and transcribed text is yours […] You can route it to a different app via a webhook, and the LLM supports model context protocol (MCP), so you can add new functionality that also runs locally. The AI model will also be released as an open source project.
What the hell? They are delaying their new watches left and right, cancel pre-orders because they ran out of parts, and now they’re doing this, just out of the blue?
A gadget you throw away when the battery runs out is a very dumb idea
It should be outlawed if you ask me. “Battery Life: Years of average use” What if it dies after a month? The warranty they offer is 30 days, meaning that this is pretty much meant to be junk.
Just get an old Sony MP3 recorder…
Oh wait, here’s the best thing. They acknowledge this in their FAQ and that’s one of their reasons:
You’d probably lose the charger before the battery runs out!
Idiots.
So, classic Eric Migicovsky. There was a reason I was staying away from this RePebble shit entirely.
This is the same guy who offered integration between Beeper and iMessage and had it broken by Apple in under a week, and then… just stopped trying after promising it to customers.
Then when he got bored with Beeper he sold it to Automattic.
It’s so much like his original run with Pebble as well, where he fucked over the devs on their way out who were promised jobs with the sale of the company, to find out late in the game that wasn’t actually happening.
I think Migicovsky being allowed to startup companies and then throw them in the bin when he gets bored while pocketing the profit should be outlawed.
OR I can use a pen and paper for pennies.
What are you, some kind of Luddite?
I’m practical I suppose. I have a tool that does this already cheaply, why do I need a product likely made by slaves in a sweat shop, with materials people are going to wars over, that will end up in a landfill because it broke or is deprecated in less than a few years?
