Omi是一款可穿戴AI设备，旨在通过始终在线的麦克风和AI技术，成为用户的个人助手和导师。它能总结对话、提供信息，甚至通过“Personas”功能模拟名人进行交流。Omi目前主要功能是作为日常伴侣，帮助用户记录信息、查询资料。它通过开放源代码和应用商店，鼓励开发者参与创新。虽然早期版本存在一些问题，但Omi的愿景是成为一个更广泛的平台，而不仅仅是一个设备。未来，Omi甚至可能通过脑机接口理解用户的想法，改变人机交互的方式。

👂Omi的核心功能是始终在线的麦克风，它像一个个人助手一样，可以随时倾听并记录用户的对话和环境声音。这使得Omi能够即时提供信息、总结会议要点，并为用户提供个性化的反馈。

🤖Omi的“Personas”功能允许用户通过输入名人的X账号，创建模拟该名人社交形象的AI聊天机器人。这个功能为用户提供了一种独特的学习和交流方式，例如，用户可以通过与AI“埃隆·马斯克”的对话，获得工作和生活上的建议。

📱Omi不仅是一个硬件设备，更是一个开放的平台。它拥有一个应用商店，鼓励开发者利用其音频输入功能开发各种应用，如将音频数据接入Zapier和Google Drive。这种开放的生态系统使得Omi的功能具有很强的可扩展性。

🧠Omi的未来愿景是探索脑机接口技术，以理解用户的想法。虽然目前该技术还处于早期阶段，但Omi的最终目标是打造一个能够真正理解用户意图并提供个性化服务的AI设备，从而改变人机交互的方式。

Nik Shevchenko closes his eyes and starts to focus intently. He’s spent the last half hour or so telling me about his new product, an $89 wearable called Omi that can listen to, summarize, and get information out of your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. So his eyes are closed, and he’s focusing all his attention on the round white puck stuck 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 Verge, like as a news media website?” Shevchenko asks, to no one in particular. Then he waits. Fifteen or so seconds later, a notification pops up on his phone, with some AI-generated information about how reputable and terrific a news source The Verge is. Shevchenko is thrilled, and maybe a little relieved. The device read his brain waves to understand he was talking to it, and not to me, and answered his question without any prompting or switching.

So far, that’s all the brain-computer-interface stuff Omi can do. And it seems pretty fragile. “It just understands one channel,” he says, “it’s one electrode.” What he’s trying to build is a device that understands when you’re talking to it and when you’re not. And then eventually understands and saves your thoughts, which Shevchenko both waves off as total science fiction and says will probably be possible in two years. Whenever it happens, he thinks it might change the way you use your AI devices.

Image: Omi

For now, the Omi’s actual purpose is much simpler: it’s an always-listening device (the battery apparently lasts three days on a charge) that you wear on a lanyard around your neck that can help you make sense of your day-to-day life. There’s no wake word, but you can still talk to it directly because it’s always on. 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 offhandedly wondered about the price of Bitcoin during our conversation and got a notification from the Omi companion app a few seconds later with the answer. There’s also an Omi app store, which developers are already using to plug the audio input into things like Zapier and Google Drive.

For Shevchenko himself, though, Omi is a personal mentor above all else. “I was born in the middle of nowhere on an island near Japan,” he tells me, and always wanted access to the tech visionaries he grew up admiring. For years, he says he cold-emailed people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk asking for advice and mentorship on how to make it in tech but never got much response. With no real-life options, Shevchenko decided to build his own.

Omi already has a product called “Personas,” which allows you to plug in anyone’s X handle and create a bot that assumes their social network persona. When Shevchenko shares his screen with me, it shows he’s been chatting with an AI Elon Musk for a long time. “It helps me to understand what I should be working on tomorrow,” Shevchenko says. “Or when I’m talking to someone and I don’t know an answer to the question, it will give me a small nudge — it sometimes tells me I’m wrong!” His wearable heard him say he was sick a few days ago and has been reminding him ever since to get more rest. He asks it every month to give him feedback and tell him how to do better.

He gets a lot of notifications from the Omi app, including during our call, and not all of them make much sense — one was just a transcription of a sentence he’d said a minute earlier. Shevchenko acknowledges it’s early, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the system’s misses. The communication works for him.

Image: Omi

Most people won’t use Omi this way, though. The product will ship widely in the second quarter of this year, but Shevchenko says the 5,000 people with an early version of the device are using it to help remember things, look up information, and perform other tasks common to AI assistants.

In that sense, Omi has a lot in common with devices like the Limitless Pendant and bears a striking resemblance to another wearable called Friend. When Friend launched last year, Shevchenko claimed Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann was stealing his work, and the subsequent beef included everything from sniping on X to a freestyle rap diss track. Omi was actually called Friend for a while, and Shevchenko says he changed the name both to avoid confusion and because Schiffmann dropped $1.8 million on Friend.com and subsequently dominated search results.

Shevchenko is confident that Omi can improve on those other devices. All of Omi’s 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 only one piece of the puzzle. The company is using models from OpenAI and Meta to power Omi, so it can iterate more quickly on the product itself.

For all their issues and underlying concerns, it’s clear that AI models are already good enough to feel like a true companion to millions of people. You can feel about that however you’d like, but from Omi and Friend to Character.AI and Replika, bot friends are quickly becoming real friends. What they need, then, is both more information about you and more ways to help you. Omi thinks the first answer is an always-on microphone, and the second is an app store. Then, I guess, comes the brain.