Artificial intelligence has come a long way in a very short space of time, writing emails, answering questions, generating code, images, video and more besides. But as breathtaking as these advances are, using AI is still a hassle. People have to dig out their smartphone and find the right app, then enter a prompt before anything gets done.

Seeking to eliminate this friction is a startup called Aina Computers Inc., which has just emerged from 15 months in “stealth mode” to launch its flagship product: an AI-native smart ring equipped with an OLED display that’s purpose-built to control autonomous AI agents.

Aina founder Apoorv Shankar told SiliconANGLE that the development of hardware interfaces has not kept pace with the advances in AI. For people to access intelligence, they need to go fumbling through smartphone applications or switch on a laptop.

Even the most basic tasks, like ordering an Uber, require someone to open an app, enter their destination and click to confirm. To join a virtual meeting, the user still has to dig through their emails to find the right link. In Shankar’s view, AI is trapped behind a software layer and that means it cannot proactively serve people when they need it.

Aina’s Ring is meant to free AI from these binds and make it as simple to access as uttering a command. The Ring is made from titanium and comes equipped with a colorful OLED display, a microphone and a speaker, and an 18-hour battery. There’s also a mechanical “shifter” that can track thumb gestures in four directions.. “We started building Aina with a thesis that AI would evolve from following instructions to anticipating what we need,” Shankar explained.

The device is powered by Aina’s Context Aware Operating System software, which is designed to learn the Ring wearer’s behavior over time in order to anticipate their needs. It can connect to the user’s devices, such as their smartphone and computer, and also any AI agents they use. Once it’s up and running, it tries to anticipate what users will need at any given moment and surface the information they need on the Ring’s display before they even ask for it.

“With proactive agents, this shift has already begun,” Shankar said. “Agents like Muse, Instinct and Dots will soon run hundreds of our daily tasks, yet we still have to instruct them by text or voice. But soon, they’ll learn our patterns, build on our context and turn proactive for almost every interaction, waiting only for our approval.”

Shankar founded Aina last year. The startup was originally a human-computer interaction research lab. Its 40-person team experimented with dozens of different hardware concepts, including an adaptive three-key Mac keypad called Dune, before ultimately settling on the Ring as the ultimate interface for AI agents.

Aina’s $399 Ring is available for pre-order now and will ship to customers in January. That’s the date at which people’s relationship with AI is set to fundamentally change, Shankar believes. When someone wears Aina’s Ring, the way they interact with their AI agents will generally become a matter of simply saying yes or no, for they will quickly learn to anticipate what their users need, at the moment they need it, he said.

Users can interact with the Ring in three ways. The microphone is there to support voice interactions. The user simply presses and holds the button in the center to call up an agent and instruct it to do something, or else they can just use it to record some quick notes. It will also be able to relay phone calls, enabling people to converse by just holding their hand close to their ear.

The Ring also supports cues that are powered by the context-aware operating system. As it learns to anticipate user’s needs, it will be able to proactively order an Uber ride based on the time of day, their location and their schedule. All the user has to do is click or say “yes” to confirm and the Ring will book the ride. Alternatively, if someone is late for an appointment, the Ring will proactively draft a message to let the person they’re meeting know when they’ll arrive.

Shankar said the Ring can also be used as a remote control, so if someone is watching TV they’ll be able to tell it to pause or rewind the show they’re watching. It can adjust microphones and cameras during video calls, skip to the next track when someone’s listening to music on their iPod and so on.

“Every major shift in computing has come from software and hardware built together,” Shankar said. “The mouse and GUI brought us personal computing. The touchscreen and the app gave us mobile computing. Now with Aina we enter a new era, with personalized computing right at your fingertips.”

Images: Aina