The Omi guide
Omi is the open-source AI wearable we build the Keeper on, so we follow it closely. This is what we've gathered: what each model costs and whether you can actually buy it, how to set one up, what reviewers found once the novelty wore off, and the video reviews worth your time.
Checked today
Prices and stock are read straight from Omi's own store. We put this first because it's the question everything else depends on — and right now the answer is uncomfortable.
Read from the omi.me store on 6 August 2026. Stock moves; check the shop before you plan around this.
Every piece of hardware is out of stock. The gift card is the only thing you can buy outright. That is not a glitch in one product line — it's the whole shelf.
Read it as a supply problem rather than a shutdown: the software, the documentation and the community are all still active, and Omi's own docs are being updated. But if you need a working device in your hands by a particular date, do not assume you can order one. This is the single most important thing on this page.
The directory
The whole thing in six steps — charge, app, account, pairing, firmware, first recording. Plus how to ask it good questions, what to do when it misbehaves, and how to set one up for somebody else.
Read the setup guide → What people foundWe read the coverage so you don't have to. Where every reviewer agrees, where they split, and the complaints that show up again and again once people have lived with one.
Read the review round-up → The whole fieldThe full chart — Omi, Plaud, Bee, Friend, Limitless, Humane, Rewind — by price, owner, status and who ends up holding your recordings. Three of the six are now owned by Meta, Amazon or HP.
See the comparison chart → Watch firstFive hands-on reviews you can watch right here, from a ninety-second first impression to a twelve-minute teardown of daily use. Every one checked to make sure it plays.
Watch the reviews → Coming from LimitlessYour old pendant can be paired with Omi and your transcripts imported, which means the hardware outlives the service. The full procedure, and the deadline you're working against.
Read the Limitless guide →The short version
Omi is a small wearable made by Based Hardware, a San Francisco company that launched it at CES in January 2025. You wear it, it listens, and it turns your conversations into transcripts, summaries and to-do items you can search and ask about later. It answers to "Hey Omi."
The thing that makes it unusual is not the hardware — it's that all of it is open source under the MIT licence. The circuit board, the firmware, the phone app and the server software behind it are published. That means the device can, if you want, be pointed at a server you control rather than the maker's cloud, and it means no acquisition can quietly switch your recordings off. We have watched that happen to other people's pendants, which is why it matters to us.
There is also an app store around it, and the apps are stranger and more interesting than you'd expect: a mentor, a cognitive-bias spotter, a joke extractor. That ecosystem is a genuine advantage over the sealed alternatives.
| Inside the consumer model (CV1) | |
|---|---|
| Processor | nRF5340 dual-core Bluetooth LE |
| Wireless | nRF7002 Wi-Fi 6 |
| Microphones | Two T5838 top-port PDM mics |
| Battery | About a day to a few days, by model and use |
| Licence | MIT — hardware, firmware, app and backend |
What it costs to run
Most devices in this category need a monthly plan to be useful at all. Omi's free tier is genuinely usable, because it pushes the work onto your phone instead of a server someone has to pay for.
Prices read from the Omi store on 6 August 2026. Review sites have quoted the pendant at $89 and $129 at various points over the past year, so treat any price you read elsewhere — including ours — as a snapshot.
Straight from the source
We'd rather point you at the primary sources than paraphrase them badly. These are the pages worth bookmarking.
Where we stand
We build the Keeper — an in-home memory aid for people living with memory loss — on open hardware, and Omi is the best open device in this category. So we're not neutral, and you should know that.
What we're not is quiet about the drawbacks. Omi is cheap, hackable and honest about where your data goes, and it is also rough, frequently out of stock, and a poor fit for anyone who wants a thing that simply works out of the box. Both halves of that are true, and which half matters more depends entirely on who you are.
If you want to run one yourself, the setup guide is the place to start. If you'd rather someone came and did all of this — the device, the setup, the teaching, the ongoing help, with your day kept on your own equipment — that's the Keeper, and it's what we do.
Not sure it's the right device
Tell us what you're trying to solve and we'll say honestly what fits — including when the answer isn't us.
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