The Rise of AI Wearables, and How We Learned to Detect Them

A new generation of AI-powered wearables is showing up in meeting rooms, at conferences, and across dinner tables. They’re small, they’re useful, and most people in the room have no idea they’re there.

The devices

Each one takes a slightly different approach, but they share a common thread: always-on audio capture paired with AI processing.

Omi (Based Hardware) is an open-source AI wearable worn as a pendant or clip. It continuously listens, transcribes conversations, and feeds them into an AI assistant for recall and summarization. The open-source angle has made it popular with developers and early adopters.

Friend takes a more ambient approach. It’s an always-on AI companion pendant designed to be worn throughout the day. Less meeting tool, more personal AI that’s always in the loop.

Limitless Pendant is purpose-built for the professional crowd. Meeting capture, transcription, action item extraction. It’s positioned as the device you wear to never miss a detail in a conversation again.

PLAUD NotePin strips the concept down to its simplest form. A small pin with a microphone and AI processing. Minimal design, maximum discretion.

Bee AI focuses on conversational intelligence, recording and summarizing interactions with an emphasis on relationship context and follow-ups.

Brilliant Frame moves the form factor to smart glasses with an integrated AI assistant, adding a visual layer to the audio capture these other devices provide.

The disclosure gap

These are legitimate products solving real problems. But they introduce something new: passive recording in shared spaces without any visible indicator to the people around the wearer.

A phone on the table is a signal. A laptop open during a meeting is expected. A small pendant or pin that’s always listening? There’s no established social norm for that yet. No red recording light. No “this meeting is being recorded” prompt. The technology arrived before the etiquette.

This matters in rooms where sensitive conversations happen. A startup pitch, a legal consultation, a medical appointment, a private dinner. The absence of disclosure is the gap.

What our research surfaced

WIRESHIELD’s R&D team investigated whether these devices leave a detectable footprint. They do. Each one communicates with the wearer’s phone over Bluetooth Low Energy, and each one advertises identifiers unique to its product line.

We built a detection system covering six device families that identifies them with near-zero false positives. It’s fully integrated into WIRESHIELD’s existing scanning. No setup, no extra permissions, no separate feature to toggle. When an AI recording wearable is active nearby, WIRESHIELD identifies it by product name.

How awareness changes the room

What you do with that awareness depends entirely on context.

Maybe you’re in a meeting that turns toward something you’d rather not have transcribed. A quiet tap on your watch from the WIRESHIELD companion app gives you the information you need for a smooth exit. No scene, no confrontation.

Or maybe you’re at a conference and you notice someone nearby is wearing an Omi. That’s not necessarily a problem. It might be a great conversation starter. “Is that the Based Hardware pendant? How’s the transcription quality?” In a room full of potential clients and investors, knowing what technology people are carrying tells you something about who they are and what they value.

Awareness isn’t about suspicion. It’s about being informed.

What’s next

Smart glasses from major manufacturers use different wireless patterns, and detection support for those is in development. The AI wearable market is growing quickly, and as new devices ship, we’ll add them.