AI wearables have been taking one hell of a beating in the past few weeks thanks to Meta’s failures to protect people’s privacy.
The iKairos is a modular AI wearable that landed $29 million in funding that has made some very clever design choices which gives it the edge when it comes to privacy.
There’s no price yet, nor is there a firm release date either. Lingverse says preorders will open sometime later this year through its own site, with each unit shipping within 90 days of order, and that core features will sit behind a free tier while more advanced ones need a subscription the company hasn’t detailed. Nothing has been said about Irish or EU pricing specifically, so this is one to watch rather than one to add to a wishlist just yet.
A pendant that doubles as a desktop robot
iKairos is built around what Lingverse calls a Neural Core, a small, and admittidly rather cute, circular module that pulls out of one body and slots into another. At launch that means two options, a small desktop robot that sits on a desk and observes how someone works, or a necklace pendant version that goes wherever the wearer does. Swapping between the two is meant to give the AI two different vantage points on the same life, one looking at the user, one looking out from them.
What LifeOS is built to do
LifeOS is the software tying those two perspectives together into what Lingverse describes as an ongoing understanding of a user’s routines, preferences and relationships. In the company’s own examples, it notices when someone keeps mentioning a hobby they never follow through on and nudges them toward booking a beginner lesson, or recalls the exact colour and texture of something admired in a gallery days earlier so nobody has to dig through a phone gallery for it.
AI journaling is the first feature built on top of that ongoing context, rather than a bolted-on note taking app. None of this has been independently tested, and Lingverse is the only one who’s used it so far, so take the examples as a description of intent rather than a proven result. I’ve seen first-hand, mutliple times, the advantage of having AI running to catch something you miss yourself and it’s perhaps the moment where privacy and convenience trade offs reach balance.
Privacy built into the hardware
The release leans on privacy, and to be fair, there’s something concrete behind it this time. iKairos has a physical camera shutter, a separate privacy indicator light and a manual mute button, and my hands-on accounts from the show floor describe the camera as sitting under a slider that has to be physically pushed up before the lens is exposed. The team themselves admit they were slow to give up the valuable visual data, but felt privacy would be more important. A decision made some time ago that is likely going to pay off big time if you ask me.
Voice detection and capture are handled locally on the device, cloud processing only happens with the user’s own authorisation, and Lingverse says the data isn’t used to train its underlying model, with users able to set retention periods and delete records whenever they like.
The camera is the part worth watching
This is where iKairos gets more interesting than most IFA reveals. Meta’s smart glasses have spent the last year turning a camera worn on your face into something closer to a punchline than a feature, largely because the indicator light meant to signal recording turned out to be trivial to defeat and impossible for anyone nearby to rely on. It’s part of why the more interesting always-on AI wearables lately have skipped the camera altogether, Viaim’s RecDot notetaking earbuds and Soundcore’s Liberty 5 Pro Max both show that constantly listening AI earns its keep once it’s honest about what it’s picking up, and Plaud’s newly announced One earbuds are chasing the same idea. iKairos is different because it keeps the camera, but a slider that has to be physically shoved up rather than a light nobody trusts anymore looks like the correct lesson learned from Meta’s mess. Fair play to Lingverse for at least designing around the problem instead of ignoring it. Whether it holds up once real units are in real pockets is a different question, and one Goosed can only answer once we’ve had a unit in hand for a period of time.
For now, iKairos is a waitlist and a promise. Anyone curious can sign up on Lingverse’s own site to hear when preorders open.
