This AI Recorder Ring Deepfakes Your Voice to Let You ‘Interface With Your Thoughts’

If Plaud selling a million of its notetaking devices wasn’t enough to convince you that AI recorders are a real thing, maybe a ring will do the trick. Introducing the Stream Ring, a new AI recorder or “mouse for voice†from a startup called Sandbar, which puts its own (kind of creepy) spin on the idea.

The Stream Ring, is (duh) a ring that comes with a microphone and functions much in the same way as Plaud’s card-sized device. It records your voice at the push of a button and lets you record ideas or “moments of inspiration,†as Sandbar puts it. The difference? The Stream Ring, as a part of its onboarding process, listens to your voice and attempts to mimic it using a feature it calls “Inner Voice.†The idea here is that talking to the Stream Ring, which runs AI models in the cloud, will feel more like… talking to yourself.

“It creates the feeling of talking with yourself, a conversational layer designed to sound like you, allowing you to develop ideas more naturally and intuitively,†Sandbar states in a press release. Sure! That’s one way to characterize the idea of talking to yourself at length.

Outside of that fairly strange choice of using AI to mimic your voice, the Stream Ring functions similarly to other AI notetaking devices. To record, you hold the ring up to your mouth and press a touchpad on the device to capture your thoughts (Sandbar says it only records when you want it to), which is then confirmed by haptic feedback. All of your recordings are accessible in an app (called Stream) afterward, where you can view and edit your conversations. Sandbar claims that all of your recordings are encrypted both when they’re stored and when they’re being transferred to servers, but as always, you use a device like this at your own risk. If all of your voice notes get hacked at some point, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

Sandbar also hasn’t shared any tech specs. How long is the battery life for this AI recorder ring? We have no idea yet.

Unlike Plaud, Sandbar isn’t crowdfunded via Kickstarter and is actually using venture funds raised by its founders, former members of CTRL-Labs, a neural band startup that was acquired by Meta (then Facebook) in 2019 for between $500 million and $1 billion, according to CNBC. To give you even more of an idea of how apparently popular the AI recorder market is becoming, it’s worth noting that Sandbar has already raised $13 million to make its Stream Ring, which decidedly ain’t nothin’ for a fairly niche-seeming device.

Clearly, Sandbar sees itself a little differently than upstarts like Plaud, though, which focuses more on productivity as opposed to creativity and “expanding your capacity to think,†which are sentiments that Sandbar mentions frequently in its description of the Stream Ring. One thing that seems to be unavoidable in any iteration of these devices is that they come saddled with a subscription if you want to get the most out of the recorder.

The Stream Ring comes in either silver or gold and is available for preorder at $249 and $299, respectively. Sandbar says the Stream Ring will start shipping in summer 2026. Sandbar is also upselling a version of its app called Stream Pro, which gives users unlimited notes and chats, as well as early features. Sandbar is including three months free, but after that it will cost you $10 per month (but only for “early customersâ€). No word on how much the app subscription will cost if you’re not. There’s a free tier, too, though, if you feel like you don’t need that much storage.