Prioritizing privacy and jewelry-grade design, the pendant ignores the room to focus exclusively on the wearer’s voice
While most AI wearables are racing to record the world around you, a new pendant called the Taya Necklace is taking a different path.
Now open for public pre-orders via the startup’s website, the $89 device is designed to be a note-taker that remains off by default, capturing only the wearer’s voice to address the growing trend of always-on microphones.
The Taya Necklace works via a simple button-activated system. To record a thought or reminder, you tap the pendant; to stop, you tap it again.
To ensure it doesn’t pick up ambient conversations, the hardware features directional microphones and a speaker-verification system trained on the user’s voice during initial setup. This allows the AI to prioritize the wearer’s speech while filtering out background noise and bystanders.
Unlike the plastic aesthetic of many AI pins—or other AI-first hardware, such as smart glasses—Taya is positioned as a jewelry-first accessory.
The startup, founded by former Apple design engineer Elena Wagenmans, is pitching the necklace as something people would want to wear even if the tech were disabled.
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(Image credit: Taya)
Recordings are also processed through an iOS companion app that transcribes notes and allows users to query their personal archive via an AI chat interface.
The company recently secured $5 million in seed funding from MaC Venture Capital and Female Founders Fund to finish production, and the first units are expected to ship later this year.
The Wareable take: Taking a different path
The always-there inevitability of many early AI wearables has faced significant social pushback, so Taya’s focus on manual capture is a refreshing alternative. Naturally, it’s also one built primarily with women in mind—another rarity in tech.
By making the recording a deliberate act rather than an ambient background process, the brand avoids the ethical and privacy minefields that have tripped up competitors.
If the voice-only isolation holds up in a noisy atmosphere, this could be the most socially acceptable AI device we’ve seen yet.
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