after reboot pebbles The founder of the smartwatch brand is Eric Migicovsky Expansion of His company’s device lineup is bolstered by a new smart wearable: an AI-powered smart ring known as index 01Named after the finger where the ring is to be worn, the new $75 ring is not meant to be a perpetual-wear competitor, always-listening AI devices, like the AI Pendant Friend, but instead offer a way to record quick notes and reminders by pressing a button on the side of the ring.
AI only comes into play through open source, speech-to-text, and AI models that run locally on your smartphone. pebble mobile appThat means if the ring button is not being pressed then recording is not taking place, (And it’s a press-and-Catch Also gesture, which means you can’t start recording Ring and then secretly give permission to record the conversation.)
You can wear a stainless steel ring while taking a shower, washing hands, washing dishes or in the rain, but you will need to take it off for other water-related activities like swimming. At launch, it is water resistant up to 1 meter.
The Ring is also not a fitness tracker or sleep monitor. It doesn’t record details about your heart rate or health. And it’s not meant to be your AI friend.
“I’m not trying to build some AI assistant thing,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch in an interview. “I make things that solve a core problem, and they solve it really well,” he explains. “I think of (the ring) as an external memory to my brain…that’s it. It’s always with you.”
Plus, Ring is designed to be highly reliable and privacy-preserving, he says, because all your views are stored on your phone, not in the cloud. There is no subscription.
Migikovsky’s ring enters the growing market of voice-note wearables. Last month, Sandbar, a New York-based startup founded by former Meta employees, unveiled its Stream Ring, which also lets users record thoughts via a touch-activated microphone. However, unlike Index 01’s no-subscription model, Sandbar’s $249 ring offers a free tier with limited AI interactions and a $10 per month Stream Pro subscription for unlimited chat and early access to features. The Stream Ring is expected to ship next summer.
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Migicovsky has been wearing his ring for three months now and says he can’t imagine going back to a world where he doesn’t always have a memory device with him.
“The problem is that, during the day, I get ideas or I remember something, and if I don’t write it down in that very moment, I forget it,” he says. The Ring solves this problem, he says, without becoming another device that you need to charge.
“The batteries last for years,” claims Migicovsky.
This ring is said to support around 12 to 14 hours of recording. On average, the founder says he uses it 10 to 20 times a day to record 3 to 6 second thoughts. At that rate, he’ll get about two years of use. When the ring’s battery runs out, you can send it back to the company for recycling.
When using Index, you can record up to five minutes of audio, which can be saved to Ring and later synced to your phone. It makes sense to record brief, personal thoughts and notes even when you don’t have your phone with you, but it won’t work for recording longer conversations, such as presentations, meetings, or any kind of personal interview.
Ring also supports over 100 languages and has some on-device memory where recordings are eventually saved and transcribed for when you’re not in Bluetooth range of your device. (If speech-to-text becomes distorted due to loud background noise, the raw audio is also preserved.)
If you have a Pebble smartwatch or any other brand of smartwatch, your recorded thought may also appear on the watch screen so you can verify that it is correct.
The ring works with Pebble’s mobile app, which offers notes and reminders but can optionally also integrate with your phone’s calendaring system or other apps like Notion. And Ring’s software is open source, making it hackable by the community, the founders point out.
Due to its open nature, the Ring’s button is already programmable. In addition to the press-and-hold gesture, you can program the Ring to do other things with a single or double press, like playing or pausing your music or controlling the shutter on your phone’s camera. You can use it to send a message through the universal chat app Beeper, which Migicovsky also created, or you can add your own voice actions through mcp,
A new approach to hardware
Migicovsky acknowledges that getting hardware right can be difficult, as Pebble’s exit from Fitbit has shown. (Fitbit was later acquired by Google in 2021.)
“I didn’t make any money during Pebble — we got out, but it wasn’t a great exit,” Migicovsky admits.
However, this year, they decided to reboot the Pebble project after Google open sourced PebbleOS, which opened the door to new hardware.
With his new company, Core Devices, Migicovsky plans to do things differently.
Still, the founder does not regret his previous choice, he clarified.
“I wouldn’t go back and change anything. I like what we built. I like what we did. I like the company we built, but that’s not the only way to build a company,” he told TechCrunch. “And speaking as an ex-YC partner, there is a time and a place for building venture-backed startups. Some companies are phenomenal when they raise money and build a big team, and I tried that… What I’m doing now is trying an alternative route, which is to start from profitability,” he says.
The new company is a small team of five people, self-funded and focused on sustainability.
So far, Core Devices has shipped the Pebble 2 Duo smartwatch with a black-and-white display. Its first run sold out, and the company is now preparing to ship an upgraded version, the Pebble Time 2. The new device, which has seen 25,000 pre-orders, is a stainless steel watch with a large, colorful e-ink screen.
For Index 01, the ring’s preorder offer will end in March 2026. After that, the price increases to $99. It currently comes in Silver, Polished Gold and Matte Black and works with iOS and Android devices. Customers can choose from eight ring sizes ranging from 6 to 13.
