Senstone Wearable Voice Recorder

Live on Kickstarter today, Senstone is an “Intelligent Wearable Voice Recorder” – the first of its kind, according to Senstone Founder and CEO Nazar Fedorchuk. The concept for this device is simple: touch the device to activate it and take voice notes that will be automatically organized and synced to the cloud, automatically.

The device itself is a neat-looking piece that is gender-neutral and relatively discrete. It can be hung to a necklace, clipped to a shirt or worn as a watch, thanks to a special case. To use it, touch it and speak. As long as Senstone is close to your mouth, it records your voice and gets to work. Senstone’s cloud keeps the recording and generates a text version as well. If your phone is not around, the device sync with it later. Users can add tags and search their notes once they are in the cloud.

There are straightforward applications such as taking notes to capture an idea quickly or have a recording of emotion at a specific moment. There are more complex use cases as well. For example, the Kickstarter page mentions: say “Tom, I figured you did not bring lunch today, so I ordered pizza, ” and the message is sent.

All of this would be possible because the Senstone device is “backed by AI” in the cloud and uses your smartphone as a conduit to the Internet. Of course, all of this assumes that the AI understand what you say, and performs things correctly. In fact, these ideas could be successful as an app too. The wearable part “just” takes friction away.

As with any voice-based has corner cases, and Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa have provided ample proof of that. So, it is not immediately clear how good Senstone’s complete user experience will be. Senstone does provide a couple of demos which explain how the voice is recorded, then transmitted to the cloud via a smartphone.

In the future, Senstone even plans to add noise analysis features to “understand” your environment (crowd, outdoors, meeting…). With AI, the system could even add punctuation and extract paragraphs and topics. It could even know what your mood was at the time. All of this is in theory possible since we have seen other companies perform some of these tasks.

At the end of the day, Senstone is an ambitious project that wants to cater to an existing voice-taking market. However, it also wants to create new use cases and push the envelope towards new territory. Like many Kickstarter projects, you will either need to wait for independent reviews or take a leap of faith.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Crowdfunding, Kickstarter, voice recognition, voice recorder, Wearable Tech