Almost exactly one year ago today I was at an event where I was wearing my shiny new Limitless pendant, a necklace that is constantly recording audio and transcribing it. A friend of mine came up to me, asked me what it was, I told her, and at 5:21 pm that evening (I have proof, which I realize proves her point), she exclaimed “Rob’s wearing a voice recorder and recording everything you say to him.” Yes it was very embarrassing. Yes she was making a point. And, yes, I turned it off.
I’m one of those early adopters of all the things. If I can afford the new technology, I want to try it, see how it sizes up to its promises, and see where I can use it. The pendant, like the Amazon Bee, the Pocket, and Plaud, is a device that records your conversations and turns them into searchable memory. Limitless was particularly cool (creepy?) because it just recorded all the time and you didn’t have to initiate the recording, so there was no chance of forgetting anything. Did you go to the doctor and forget what they said? Did you meet someone whose name you sort of caught but don’t remember who and why? Did you want to win an argument with your partner? I completely understand most are creeped out by this, and, if you ever watched the Black Mirror episode that illustrated this idea in detail, you can get a sense of why. Then, in December of 2025, Limitless itself was bought by Meta. If you trusted Limitless, that trust may not extend to Meta, and the users in the Limitless Slack group lost their minds. On December 1, 2026, the product itself will cease to function.
Glassholes and Me
I guess the public shaming was fair, and it not only made me feel bad, but also it surprised me how much discomfort people have with products like this. We did have Google Glass, the 2012 augmented reality glasses with a camera and a tiny prism that projected information just above your eye line. While I tried them and thought it was pretty cool, very quickly people wearing them got labeled Glassholes. Then, in 2021, Meta partnered with Ray-Ban and took normal looking, classic glasses and made them smart. The 2023 versions have been selling very well for a number of years, and, yes, I own a pair because 🤓. This year marks the moment they earned the moniker of “pervert glasses“ as people have been using them to film strangers, mostly women, without their knowledge. Perhaps Limitless ended up as the Muse Charm, the portable agent thing.
So, learning my lesson, I started bringing the device along with me and turning it on for more important meetings or conversations or events. For those situations, I’d place it obviously on my neck, table, or lanyard, and the light and visibility of the pendant made it easier for the other person to understand what’s going on. Of course, now I have to remember to bring and use a device to help me remember what was said, defeating the purpose of the whole enterprise.
One of the key places this device earned its keep was a panel I moderated this year at the NACO Summit in Ottawa with a bunch of investors where I did bring the pendant and wear it on my lanyard. It was informative, I was being pushy, and I later remembered that I had brought the pendant and it did record the whole thing. So I dumped the transcript and wrote “The Hard Part Just Moves“, using the actual conversation as source material. In that setting, on stage, mic’d up, in front of an audience, no one expects privacy. And, quite frankly, I’m sure if you’re a knowledge worker, Zoom, Google, Fathom, Otter, Granola, Notion, or some other note taker is joining your meeting and recording everything you say. Nowadays (and only recently), it’s a norm.
My Word Against Yours
As the death of my toy approaches, it occurs to me that the real issue is what it does to gossip. One of my favorite psychologists, Robin Dunbar, in “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language“, found that two thirds of our conversations are social talk, most of it gossip. Gossip’s job is to increase social cohesion and to keep track of who can be trusted in a social group, and who violates social norms. When you gossip, each person takes a risk by sharing something about someone else, exposing both people evenly. It also has one more feature: deniability. My word against yours. These devices take away that deniability (especially in the early adopter days when only one person has one), and break the social contract. So when my friend called me out, she did it in an... abnormal... way by announcing it out loud thereby warning the room. That’s not to say, like meeting recording, the norm won’t change. But in the meantime, I stepped into a big fat norm violation, face first.
Everyone’s Wearing a Wire
The latest iterations of this idea are the new Apple Watches that launched this year, creating my new best friend. They are about to update their software to add Live Rewind and Siri Recap features. Both features can keep the watch listening all day. Live Rewind displays the text of what was said over the last 15 seconds. Siri Recap summarizes conversations you had during your day. Apple has learned from the other companies that have tried this so far, as they always do - they rarely are first movers. They say: the watch doesn’t save a transcript, it does not save the audio, it doesn’t attribute speakers in the summaries, and the summaries are deleted after 7 days (unless you save them). It is worth noting that the whole pipeline involves the Watch, an iPhone, and Apple’s Private Cloud Compute to do all of this. Ultimately, you have to believe Apple’s self-branding as a privacy-first company, which I generally do. Yet, at the same time, these features could create the largest always-on set of wearable voice capture devices that ever existed. Will that change the way we choose to gossip? Or do we just now wear white noise machines everywhere we go?
My intention wasn’t to shame you! I found it startling and I felt compelled to tell others (in the elevator?) that you were…listening.