A working plan, with dates
Limitless support ends on 31 December 2026. If you own a Pendant and a couple of Omi devices, this is the order to do things in — export first, overlap the recorders so the record never has a hole in it, and finish with the old pendant still alive and working.
Every step below is scheduled to finish with room to spare. Nothing here should be attempted in the last fortnight.
The end state
Worth being clear about the destination before the first step. This plan assumes two Omi devices and one Limitless Pendant, and it retires none of them.
New → your everyday recorder
Set up first, and worn alongside the Limitless Pendant for a few weeks so you can compare them honestly before you commit. This is also the device you learn on, so that later you're teaching from experience rather than from a manual.
New → the wearer you're helping
Configured completely by you before it's ever handed over. Account in their name, firmware done, tested with the voices it will actually hear. They should meet a device that already works.
Dying 31 Dec → a working Omi recorder
Not retired — converted. Omi's app adopts the pendant hardware, so after the service ends it keeps recording. Its best job is the spare that covers the other two while they charge.
An Omi runs roughly a day per charge. For someone with real memory difficulty, a missed charge is a missed day — and they won't be the one who notices. A third working pendant means there is always one on the charger and one being worn, which turns the single biggest weakness of these devices into a non-issue.
Read this before you start
Everything else on this page can be redone, retried, or postponed. Your Limitless history cannot. Once the service ends, that record is unrecoverable — it can't be re-recorded, and no support desk can bring it back. So the export comes first, even though it's the dullest step.
Omi expects a pendant to be paired to a single phone, with the app running in the background and the phone within a few feet. Force-close the app and recording stops without warning. Plan the fleet around that: each person's phone looks after their own device, and swapping a pendant between phones means unpairing first.
The plan
Don't reorder them. Each phase leaves you in a working state, so if you stop halfway you're never worse off than when you started.
The only irreversible step on the page. Twenty minutes now buys back the entire history.
Go to app.limitless.ai/data-exports and request your data. Choose text-only. It produces a far smaller file and it's the version that imports cleanly into other software.
If you want the recordings as well, ask for them in their own request rather than in one enormous bundle. Big combined exports are the ones that fail.
In the Lifelog view, tick the conversations you'd genuinely grieve — a diagnosis, a last conversation, a grandchild — and use Copy for the text, or the three-dots menu to download audio for just those. Keep them somewhere of your own, outside the ZIP.
Unzip it. Read three or four transcripts at random. An export nobody opened is not a backup — it's a hope.
An external drive, another computer, a family member's machine. Two copies in two places, which is the old rule and still the right one.
In Brazil, China, the EU, Israel, South Korea, Turkey and the UK the service already ended on 19 December 2025 and stored data was deleted afterwards. There is nothing left to export — skip to phase three and rescue the hardware instead.
Wear both at once. Overlap is what prevents a gap, and it's the only way to find out whether the new device actually suits you before the old one stops.
Plug it in and leave it. A half-charged device is the most common reason a new Omi looks broken, and the firmware update in step four can fail on a low battery.
Download Omi on the App Store or Google Play — the listing may still say Friend, which is the old product name and the right app. Create the account in your own name for this device.
Bluetooth, microphone, notifications. Declining any one of them fails silently later and looks exactly like broken hardware.
Settings → Device Settings → Update Firmware. Do this even on a brand-new device — units sit in warehouses for months.
Limitless on one side, Omi on the other. At the end of each week, read the same day in both apps and compare. You are checking whether Omi hears as well in your rooms, with your voices — not whether it works in general.
This is also when you learn the asking side: "what did I discuss yesterday", "summarise the last three days". Anchor questions in time and describe topics naturally; it searches by meaning, not keywords.
Full detail, including troubleshooting, is in the Omi setup guide.
Two separate jobs that share a phase: your old records move into Omi, and your old hardware becomes an Omi device.
In the Omi app go to Profile → Import Data and select the ZIP from phase one. If an export that included audio refuses to import, delete the Audio and Meetings folders from it, re-zip, and try again. Very large files may need splitting.
Omi imports transcripts, not audio. Your written record comes across; the recordings stay wherever you saved them. This is exactly why phase one step three mattered.
Search for three things you know happened — a name, a place, an appointment. If they come back, the migration worked. Do this before you touch the pendant itself.
Not in the Omi app — in the phone's own Bluetooth screen. A lingering system pairing is the single most common reason the next step fails.
If it's showing solid red, hold the button ten seconds or more until that clears. Then a quick double-press — a tap, then immediately hold — and watch for a purple light while you're holding. Release when the purple goes.
Solid blue means it's ready to pair. If you don't reach solid blue, don't continue; repeat the reset.
Tap Connect at the top left of the Omi app and choose the pendant. Pair inside the app — pairing from the phone's Bluetooth settings is what breaks it.
Wear the converted pendant for one ordinary day and confirm transcripts appear. Only then stop wearing the Omi alongside it.
Keep the Omi app alive in the background, keep the phone within a few feet, pair it to one phone only, and on Android turn off aggressive battery optimisation for the app. English is markedly the most accurate language.
It's a second life for the hardware, not a seamless upgrade — but it's one no acquisition can take away, because there's no company left in the middle to switch it off.
Nobody's first experience of a memory aid should be a firmware progress bar. Do every fiddly thing before the device leaves your hands.
Charge, pair, firmware, test recording — all of it, on their phone, before the handover. Repeat phase two's steps two through four on the second device.
Their email, their password, written down somewhere they can find it. It is tempting to use your own address so you can help — resist it. It's their record of their life, and untangling it later is genuinely difficult.
A transcript that's flawless in a quiet office and useless at their kitchen table has told you nothing. Sit where they sit, with the people they talk to.
Decide together how much family sees, and tell visitors the device is there. A recorder nobody mentioned causes far more trouble than one everybody knows about. If the wearer can't reliably consent moment to moment, that conversation belongs with them and their family, not just with you.
Put it on in the morning. Put it on the charger at night. That's the whole curriculum for the first week. Asking it questions can wait — and by then they'll want to, which is a far better way to learn it.
Where memory difficulty is significant, the person wearing it may never open the app. That isn't failure — it means you are the one doing the asking, on their behalf. Plan for that from the start rather than being disappointed by it.
These devices fail quietly. Five minutes a week is the difference between a memory aid and an ornament.
Not a dead battery — you'd notice that. It's the app quietly closed a fortnight ago, with no recordings since and nothing to announce it. Opening yesterday's transcript is the check that catches it, and it takes ten seconds.
On a calendar
Deliberately front-loaded. Everything critical lands months before the deadline, because export tools become unreliable exactly when everyone rushes them.
Phase one. Export from Limitless, text-only. Verify the files open. Second copy stored elsewhere.
Phase two. First Omi live and worn in parallel with the Pendant. Two full weeks of side-by-side comparison.
Phase three. History imported and spot-checked. Pendant reset and converted to an Omi device. One full day of testing.
Phase four. Second Omi prepared, account created, tested in the right rooms, handed over. Two habits taught.
Phase five. Weekly checks running. Everything working without Limitless in the loop at all.
Final sweep. One last Limitless export in case anything was added since. Confirm nothing you rely on still depends on the service.
Support ends. If the plan ran, this date passes without you noticing — which is the entire point of doing it early.
Planning for trouble
Request it again, text-only, and split it if it's large. Do this in August, not December — when the deadline nears, everyone requests at once. Meanwhile keep hand-saving individual conversations.
Repeat the reset — the double-press needs to be faster than feels natural. Confirm you forgot it in the phone's Bluetooth settings first. If it still won't, you've lost a spare, not your history.
Delete the Audio and Meetings folders, re-zip, retry. Split anything very large. The transcripts are what you need across; audio you keep yourself regardless.
Nearly always how it's worn. Move it outside clothing, higher on the chest, microphones unobstructed. Retest the same setting before concluding anything about the device.
It frequently is. This is the strongest argument for converting the Limitless Pendant rather than shelving it — a spare you already own beats a backorder.
The commitment was "throughout 2026" and no firmer date was published. If it stops early and you've done phase one, you lose the remaining months of convenience — not the record.
The longer view
Following this plan leaves you on open hardware and open software, with your history intact and a spare device in the drawer. That's a considerably better position than the one Limitless owners were put in — but it's worth naming what it is and isn't.
By default, an Omi still sends what it hears to Omi's servers. The difference from every closed device is that this is a choice rather than a cage: because the backend is published under the MIT licence, the same pendant can be pointed at a machine you control instead. That's a real project, not an afternoon, and most people never do it. But the option existing is precisely what makes the hardware survivable.
If the whole thing sounds like more administration than you want — particularly if the person you're helping needs this to simply work, with someone to ring when it doesn't — that's the gap the Keeper was built for. Same principle, none of the assembly, and a real person in Central Texas rather than a Discord channel.
Want a hand with any of it
No charge and no obligation for that part — it's the step with a deadline, and nobody should lose their history to a form that timed out. Related: the Limitless guide, Omi setup, the whole field compared.
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