- Pebble unveiled the Pebble Index 01, a new smart ring
- It is made up of “a button and a microphone, a little memory and a Bluetooth chip”.
- It records voice notes and uses an on-device LLM in the open source Pebble app to interpret instructions or transcribe
Core Devices, the company relaunching the original Pebble smartwatch, has revealed the Pebble Index 01, a smart ring that’s very different from the Oura Ring 4, Samsung Galaxy Ring, and the rest of the best smart rings on our list.
Without heart rate sensors or motion detectors, it’s not a health tracker. Instead, it’s designed as an “external memory for the brain,” using a button-activated microphone to send voice notes to the Pebble app.
Once the voice note arrives, the on-device LLM in the Pebble app (an open source app that lets you read the code and see how it works) interprets the instruction the same way most voice assistants do: as a voice note, a timer, an alarm, or a reminder. Raw audio can also be played in the app, and you can set the note, alarm, timer, or reminder to play on a Pebble smartwatch or other device.
Otherwise, there’s no real output on the ring – no speaker or vibrating motor, just a small RGB LED. A blog post from Pebble and Core Devices founder Eric Migicovsky reveals that users can “set up single/double clicks to control whatever you want (smart home, Tasker, etc.)” and that you can “add your own voice actions via MCP.” MCP stands for “model context protocols,” a framework that AIs use to perform actions and connect to external systems.
Priced at $75 (around £56 / AU$113), the Pebble Index 01 is available in black, gold and silver, in eight sizes. It’s also not designed to be recharged: the battery would last for years and the device can be returned to Pebble for recycling.
Back to basics
Basically, it is a very simple device. It’s just “a button and a microphone, a bit of memory and a Bluetooth chip,” according to Migicovsky, plus the battery to power it. There is also no personality attached to the LLM in the app, like those found in Siri or Alexa; he just records, transcribes, answers questions, and organizes without inserting himself into the process.
“We made a lot of decisions, toward the idea of being a reliable external memory for your brain,” said Migicovsky, who spoke to me from New York. “If you take it off and you don’t have it on, you’ll fall back into these other habits. If you charge it, even if it’s half an hour or overnight, you forget to put it back.”
This desire for frictionless use is why Migicovsky chose a button to activate it, instead of a more modern system such as raise to talk or a wake word like an Apple Watch. “If there’s any friction in the system, a wake word or whatever, you’ll stop using it.”
Migicovsky isn’t wrong: People get frustrated when sensors don’t respond the right way, because they end up shaking their wrist or repeating themselves to Alexa. On the other hand, I use my Garmin Venu 4’s voice assistant to perform simple commands like setting timers and reminders once a day, because it’s button-activated and reliable. For Migicovsky and his company Core Devices, “reliable” was a must, followed closely by “fun.”
“To me, a gadget is something that doesn’t take itself too seriously, that brings a bit of joy into my life. It’s something that I’m passionate about – I loved reading gadget magazines and blogs, it’s fun and happy and brings a little bit of positivity.
“In the tech world right now, there just aren’t enough opportunities to get that. The company I started, Core Devices, is basically going to create cool gadgets that I want and sell them to people like me.”
Migicovsky tells me he’s been using the Pebble Index 01 for months, and it has become an integral part of his routine, easy to use with gloves thanks to the button and less awkwardly placed than a smartwatch, making it capable of one-handed operation in a very natural way.
For now, though, we’ll have to wait for Marc to find out if the Pebble Index 01 can earn its place as a simple, reliable gadget in a world of complex devices.
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