Pebble Index
Introducing Pebble Index 01 - a small ring with a button and microphone. Hold the button, whisper your thought, and it’s sent to your phone. It’s added to your notes, set as a reminder, or saved for later review.
Index 01 is designed to become muscle memory, since it’s always with you. It’s private by design (no recording until you press the button) and requires no internet connection or paid subscription. It’s as small as a wedding band and comes in 3 colours. It’s made from durable stainless steel and is water-resistant. Like all Pebble products, it’s extremely customizable and built with open source software.
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What if the speech-to-text processing misses a word or something?
You can always listen to the each recording in the app.
This sounds good, but I don’t want another device. I try to do this with my Apple Watch, but it doesn’t work as well as I’d like. Apps, of course, can’t repurpose any of the hardware buttons. I don’t know of a complication that lets you just press a button to record audio to be transcribed as text. The Reminders complication takes 4 taps (complication, Add Reminder, microphone button, Done) to add a reminder via voice. Siri works without any taps but often screws it up by trying to interpret what I said. If I mention anything that sounds like a meal, a time, or a location, I might end up with that text removed and instead have the time and location fields set on the reminder for when I arrive at that place, which is never what I want. This also seems to confuse OmniFocus and prevent it from importing the reminder.
There’s no way to recharge the ring. Migicovsky says he didn’t want yet another gadget to charge every day, so instead, the Pebble Index has non-rechargeable silver oxide hearing aid batteries designed to last two years with average use. Once the device’s battery is nearly dead, users will receive a notification in the app, and the idea is you’ll buy a new Pebble Index—an idea that’s easier to get behind knowing the ring costs just $75, though the price will jump to $99 after the first batch.
Core Devices, the new home of Pebble, says the Index is designed to be worn on your index finger (get it?), where you can easily mash the device’s button with your thumb. Unlike recording notes with a phone or smartwatch, you don’t need both hands to create voice notes with the Index.
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After you record a voice note, it’s beamed over Bluetooth to your phone (Android or iOS), and it stays there. 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.
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So instead of "yet another gadget to charge every day" (which, not for nothing, but if a ring like this did need charging every day, the design is broken), we get to throw it in the landfill after two years. WTF is wrong with these people?
@Michael Just Press Record? It works well for me.
But I agree that being able to repurpose the hardware buttons, like the Ultra's "Action" button, would be the cherry on the cake.
Apple Watch Drafts app as a complication requires a tap, dictate, and a tap to close. It has worked wonderfully for recording data, things to get, names of people I meet and want to remember. Syncs to the phone, easy to edit on the phone.
Excellent!
Whisper Memos (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisper-memos-speech-to-text/id6443658039) has a Watch app and complication (one tap from the complication starts recording).
Been using it for the last year or so, and it works pretty well. Doesn’t do all the fancy routing, but the transcriptions can be auto emailed and are also persisted in the iPhone app. Doesn’t persist the original audio, but has worked well enough for me!
On my Apple Watch, the default drafts.app complication launches with a new note and voice transcription on, so you can take a voice note transcribed to text with one tap.
@Sebby Press Record where?
@Jacob Thanks, Whisper Memos looks interesting. I don’ve love that it sends the audio to OpenAI. It doesn’t look like it can put the text into Reminders.
@MikeyP Thanks, I had Drafts installed a while back but didn’t realize it could do that. Is there a way to make it automatically send to Reminders?
Even if I had to charge this thing, it doesn’t sound like something I’d need to charge every day. Sounds more like the Kindle, which I charge whenever. Was hopeful the “hearing aid battery” thing meant I could just get a 10 pack of those and be good for years, but the notion of having to just toss the thing after two years makes it a total no-go.
(And not because of the price — $99 every couple years is ok if it’s something I constantly use — but because what if the thing doesn’t even exist for sale in two years? The whole appeal of this is that I buy it and there’s no subscription or cloud junk and I just own it. But if it’s dead after two years, what difference does the cause of death make?)
