Forget fitness trackers — external brains are the hot new wearables at CES this year

I use a notepad every day. Not a tablet, or Windows Notepad, or Google Keep, or even OneNote, I’m a plain old pen-and-paper stalwart. I’m not a meticulous journal user: my notes are messy to-do lists, scrap notes from meetings, planning stories and articles, shopping lists, and brainstorming. In essence, I use it a bit like a second brain.

I shouldn’t be surprised to see AI coming for this part of my life, too. As TechRadar’s Senior Fitness and Wearables Editor, I had my eye on all the best fitness trackers and health innovations this year, but in the world of wearables it’s ‘second brains’ that are dominating the show floor and conference halls, threatening to retire my beaten-up analog notepads.

First, it was the Pebble Index O1. Launching before CES but on display at the show, it’s a new kind of smart ring. With a tactile button, microphone, and an NFC chip linking it to your phone (on which is an app with an open-source LLM), the Index O1 allows you to add events to your calendar, set reminders, transcribe notes to yourself, and generally remember things. In a conversation with me, Pebble and Core Devices founder Eric Migicovsky referred to it as “external memory for the brain”.

It seems other wearables at CES have got the same idea. The Switchbot AI Mindclip is a device worn like a lapel pin that records conversations, sends them to the cloud and transforms them into searchable AI summaries. It reportedly supports over 100 languages, and describes itself as “a second brain”.