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".

We were on the ground at Lenovo's keynote (and posted the clip on our TikTok channel — you can watch it below), where Lenovo demonstrated its voice assistant Qira, housed in a camera-equipped pendant a bit like the creepy AI Friend concept that made the rounds last year. Anker's Soundcore Work and the Plaud NotePin are similar record-and-transcribe concepts.

As a journalist who knows all too well the pains of manual transcription, I can see the usefulness of these devices straight away. Long projects and features involving multiple interviews are a pain to work through, and it's a lot easier when I can skip backwards and forwards through the transcript, pull out the quotes I want and compare them with the original audio. Likewise, I'm sure most people who take lots of long meetings would appreciate a Ctrl+F function for their minds.

However, there's a big difference between "useful transcription feature for interviews and meetings" and "second brain". The phrasing these companies are using means they're aiming to replace the paper mind-map, not just the analog dictaphone. Instead of a physical notebook, we get AI that can be spoken to hands-free, back up your notes to the cloud (SwitchBot hasn't yet specified what cloud service it uses), allow you to search through them simply and is eminently more convenient. All for a chunky up-front purchase and a small monthly fee thereafter.

The phrasing of the "second brain" also reminds me of an MIT study about heavy AI and ChatGPT users, which explored the effects of using AI to write essays rather than the human brain across four months, measuring brain activity for each participant group. By the end of the study, the researchers found that "over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels," and showed significantly lower brain activity.

My parents have an unerring, almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the road networks in, probably, a 50-mile radius from my childhood home. They learned this the old-fashioned way. When I learned to drive, on the other hand, I used GPS to get me everywhere, and as a result became almost completely reliant on it. I don't have anywhere near the instant road-network recall my parents have, even close to home, and I'm sure many people of my generation are the same.

As someone who already makes use of AI transcription tools, I'm keen to see them get better and continue to automate one of the most mind-numbing tasks of being a journalist — transcribing interviews. However, if the second brain is going to see a lot of use outside of the workplace too, I wonder whether any more essential cognitive functions we take for granted are going to atrophy as a result.

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