After restarting it Gravel The smartwatch brand, founder Eric Migicovsky is expands his company’s line of devices with a new smart wearable: an AI-powered smart ring known as Index 01. The new $75 ring, named after the finger it’s meant to be worn on, isn’t meant to compete with the panda, always listening AI devices like the Friend locket offer a way to jot down quick notes and reminders with the push of a button on the side of the ring.
AI is enabled only through the open source, speech-to-text and artificial intelligence models that run locally on your smartphone through Pebble mobile app. That is, if the ring button is not pressed, it does not record. (And this is a guy-and-hold gesture, too, which means you can’t start recording the ringtone and then let it secretly record a conversation.)
The stainless steel ring can be worn while showering, washing hands, washing dishes or in the rain, but must be removed for other water-related activities such as swimming. When launched, it is waterproof up to 1 meter.
The ring is also not a fitness tracker or sleep tracker. It does not record details about your heart rate or health. And it’s not there to be your AI friend.
“I’m not trying to build an AI assistant,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch in an interview. “I build things that solve a basic problem and solve it very well,” he explains. “Think of [the ring] as external memory for my brain… That’s it. He is always with you.”
Plus, the ring is designed to be highly reliable and privacy-preserving, he says, since all your thoughts are stored on your phone, not in the cloud. There is no subscription.
Migicovsky’s ring taps into a growing market for portable voice devices. Last month, Sandbar, a New York-based startup founded by former Meta employees, unveiled its Stream Ring, which also lets users record their 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 chats and early access to features. The Stream Ring is expected to ship next summer.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
Migicovsky has been wearing his own ring for three months and says he can’t imagine returning to a world where he doesn’t always have a memory device with him.
“The problem is, during the day, ideas come to me or I remember something, and if I don’t write it down that second, I forget it,” she says. The ring solves that problem, he adds, without becoming another device you have to charge.
“The battery lasts for years,” claims Migicovsky.
The 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 this rate, it will have about two years of use. When the ring’s battery runs out, you can send it back to the company for recycling.
When using the Directory, you can record up to five minutes of audio, which can be saved to the ringtone and later synced to your phone. This makes sense for recording shorter, personal thoughts and notes, even when you don’t have your phone handy, but it wouldn’t work for recording a longer conversation like a presentation, a meeting, or an in-person interview of some kind.
The ring also supports over 100 languages and has some on-device memory for when you’re not in Bluetooth range of your device, where the recording is saved and eventually transcribed. (Raw audio is also preserved if speech-to-text is garbled by loud background noise.)
If you have a Pebble smartwatch or one from another brand, your recorded thought can even appear on the watch screen so you can verify that it’s correct.
The ring works with the Pebble mobile app, which offers notes and reminders, but can also optionally integrate with your phone’s calendar system or other apps, such as Notion. And the ring’s software is open source, which makes it possible for community hacking, the founder points out.
Due to its open nature, the ring button is already programmable. In addition to the press and hold gesture, you can program the ringtone to do other things with a single or double tap, like play or pause your music or control the shutter on your phone’s camera. You could use it to send a message through the universal chat app Beeper, which Migicovsky also created, or you could add your own voice actions via MCP.
A new approach to hardware
Migicovsky acknowledges that the hardware can be difficult to get right, as Pebble’s exit to 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 good exit,” Migicovsky admits.
This year, however, it decided to restart the Pebble project after Google Open Source PebbleOS opened the door to new hardware.
With his new company, Core Devices, Migicovsky plans to do things differently.
However, the founder does not regret his previous choices, he clarifies.
“I wouldn’t go back and change anything. I loved what we built. I loved what we did. I love the company we built, but that’s not the only way to build a company,” he told TechCrunch. “And speaking as a former YC partner, there’s a time and place to build a venture-backed startup. Some companies are amazing at raising money and building a great team, and I tried that… What I’m doing now is trying an alternative path, which is [to] start from profitability,” he says.
The new company is a small team of five, 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 version sold out, and the company is now preparing to ship the upgraded version, the Pebble Time 2. The newest device, which has received 25,000 pre-orders, is a stainless steel watch with a larger, color e-ink display.
As for the Index 01, the ring’s pre-order offer ends in March 2026. After that, the price increases to $99. It is currently available 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.
