A setup guide
Omi is a small open-source wearable that listens, writes down what was said, and lets you ask about it later. Here is how to get one going — in plain words, in the order you'll actually need them. Set aside about half an hour.
What you're holding
Omi is made by Based Hardware, and it is unusual in one important way: the whole thing is open source. The circuit board, the firmware inside it, the phone app, and the server software behind it are all published under the MIT license. That matters more than it sounds like it does — we'll come back to it near the end.
The current model is the Consumer Version 1, usually written CV1. There are also two developer models, DevKit 1 and DevKit 2, and a glasses version. Most of this guide is the same for all of them; where it isn't, we say so.
| Inside the CV1 | |
|---|---|
| Processor | nRF5340 dual-core Bluetooth LE chip |
| Wireless | nRF7002 Wi-Fi 6 |
| Microphones | Two T5838 top-port PDM mics |
| Battery | Roughly a day to a few days, depending on the model and how much it hears |
| Licence | MIT — schematics, firmware, app and backend all public |
Before you begin
None of this is difficult, but having it all to hand makes the difference between a pleasant half hour and a frustrating one.
The setup
Plug the Omi into a USB-C cable and let it fill up. Do this first, not last: the firmware update in step five can fail on a low battery, and a half-charged device is the single most common reason a new Omi seems broken when it isn't.
Download the Omi app on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Don't be thrown if the listing still says Friend — that was the product's earlier name, and the store entries kept it. It's the right app.
Open the app and sign up. Use the email address belonging to the person who will actually wear the device, not yours-because-it's-handy. Changing it later means moving a lot of recordings.
With the Omi awake and sitting right next to the phone, follow the app's pairing screen. It will ask permission for Bluetooth, for the microphone, and for notifications. Say yes to all three — the device genuinely cannot do its job without them, and people who decline one of them here spend the next hour wondering why nothing appears.
If the app doesn't see the device, the fixes in when something's wrong nearly always sort it.
In the app, go to Settings → Device Settings → Update Firmware. This is an over-the-air update: the phone does the work over Bluetooth and you simply wait. Leave the device still and near the phone until it finishes.
Do this even on a brand-new device. Units sit in a warehouse for months, and a good share of "my Omi has no light" or "it isn't transcribing" reports are simply old firmware.
Put the Omi on, or set it on the table between you, and have a few minutes of ordinary conversation. Then open the app and look at the transcript.
Read it properly. You are checking two different things: that words are appearing at all, and that they are the right words. Accents, quiet voices and a device buried under a jumper all change the answer.
Use the app's update button. On the DevKit models you can also flash firmware by hand — double-click the RST button, drag a .uf2 file onto the drive that appears — but the consumer CV1 is different: flashing it manually requires a special cable and a J-Link programmer. Without that hardware the CV1 simply cannot be programmed by hand.
In practice this means: if an over-the-air update goes wrong on a CV1, don't go hunting for a workaround. Contact support.
Using it
Omi searches by meaning, not by keyword, and it's unusually good at time. So ask the way you'd ask a person who was in the room — not the way you'd type into a search box.
"What did I discuss yesterday?" or "Summarise my last three days." Relative time works — it converts that into real dates behind the scenes.
"The conversation about the roof" will find it even if nobody said the word "roof" twice. It matches on meaning.
"Everything from this year" gives a mush. One day, one meeting, or one topic gives a real answer.
What did the doctor tell me to do?
Who did I see on Monday?
What did we agree at the meeting?
Day to day
Put it on in the morning. Charge it at night, beside the phone, the way you already do with a watch or hearing aids. That's it — everything else the device handles on its own.
Wear it where it can hear: outside a jumper rather than under one, clipped or hung so the microphones aren't pressed against fabric. Muffled audio is the commonest cause of a disappointing transcript, and it is the easiest thing in the world to fix.
One thing worth saying out loud, because it's a kindness and in some places a legal requirement: a device that records conversations records other people too. Recording law varies by state and by country. We wrote a plain guide to it — what the recording laws actually say — and it's worth ten minutes before you wear this into a doctor's office or a meeting.
When something's wrong
Nearly every early problem is one of three things: it needs charging, it needs the firmware update, or it needs restarting. Work through them in that order.
Charge it fully. Then run the firmware update in Settings → Device Settings. Then restart the device and the phone app. That sequence resolves the large majority of dead-on-arrival reports.
Make sure Bluetooth is on and that you granted the app Bluetooth permission when it asked — on both iPhone and Android, a declined permission fails silently and looks exactly like broken hardware. Bring the device within a foot of the phone, close the app completely, and reopen it.
Almost always a wearing problem rather than a device problem. Move it outside your clothing, higher on the chest, with nothing pressed over the microphone holes. Then test again with the same conversation you tried before, so you're comparing like with like.
Try a different USB cable — a surprising number are charge-only and carry no data. Plug straight into the computer rather than through a hub. Double-click the RST button faster than feels natural. And keep the battery above 50%. If you see a "transfer incomplete" message, that one is normal: wait thirty seconds and check whether the device restarted on its own.
Omi's own help desk is help@omi.me, and there is an active Discord community where real users answer quickly. Bugs go to GitHub issues. Anything about shipping or a missing order goes to team@basedhardware.com.
The part most guides skip
Out of the box, an Omi sends what it hears to Omi's servers, where the transcribing and the remembering happen. That is how nearly every device in this category works, and it's worth knowing plainly rather than discovering later.
What makes Omi different from most is that this is a choice rather than a cage. Because the backend is open source, the same device can be pointed at a server you control instead — the transcription, the search, the whole record kept on your own equipment. That is not a five-minute job, and it is not for everyone. But it is possible, and with most wearables it simply isn't.
It is also the reason we build the Keeper on open hardware. We have watched this category enough times now to be wary of it: a small company makes something people come to depend on, a large company buys it, and the recordings go along with the sale. That is not a hypothetical — it is exactly what happened to the Limitless Pendant.
The Keeper is our version of this idea, set up in your home by a person, with your day kept on your own equipment rather than someone's cloud. Same principle, none of the assembly. See the Keeper →
The handoff
Most people who buy one of these for a parent or a spouse make the same few mistakes. They're all easy to avoid if you know them going in.
Charge it, pair it, run the firmware update, and record a test conversation — all of it, before the device is ever given to the person who'll wear it. Nobody's first experience of a memory aid should be a firmware progress bar.
Their email, their password, written down somewhere they can find it. It is tempting to use your own so you can help — resist it. It is their record of their life, and untangling it later is genuinely difficult.
Put it on in the morning. Put it on the charger at night. That's the whole curriculum on day one. Asking questions of the app can wait a week — and by then they'll want to, which is a much better way to learn it.
Your test conversation should include the people they talk to most, in the room they usually sit in. A transcript that's perfect in a quiet office and useless at a noisy kitchen table has told you nothing useful.
Decide together how much family sees, and tell visitors it's there. A recorder nobody mentioned causes far more trouble than one everybody knows about.
This is most of what we do at Memsist, if it turns out you'd rather not. We do the setup, the teaching and the ongoing help, in person, in Central Texas.
Stuck, or just deciding
Tell us what you're trying to do and we'll tell you honestly what fits — whether that's an Omi you run yourself, something simpler, or the Keeper.
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