Hands-on with 'AI personas' earbuds: cool or odd?

The Swiss startup Rolling Square wants users to wear earphones all day every day and converse with their AI personas.

If you had a chance to look around some of the Las Vegas venues before CES 2025 officially started, you could sense that AI would likely be the key trend of the consumer tech show.

In the Las Vegas Convention Center, there were many half-assembled booths featuring signboards for earphones, laptops, robots, and other products highlighting AI integrations.

I had a conversation and a demo with the co-founder and CEO of one of the companies that want to harness AI. It's a Swiss startup called Rolling Square, which previously created ultra-portable charging cables and Bluetooth trackers.

This year, the company is showcasing Natura Umana, earphones that enable users to talk to AI personas.

“I think the earbuds are the most logical solution for an AI. People know what their earbuds are. It's not like you have weird glasses with a camera or a weird pin here,” Carlo Edoardo Ferraris tells Cybernews.

Many earphones incorporate AI assistants, but according to Ferraris, Natura Umana stands out by using AI characters powered by leading large language models (LLMs), including GPT, Gemini, and Claude.

All the AI characters have memory modules, opinions, and their own memories.

Users talk to AI personas via the Human Pods, which connect to a smartphone through the HumanOS app.

According to Ferraris, users are supposed to wear the earphones all day and remove them only before going to bed.

The demo

My first impressions of the earphones were quite average. It takes time to adjust them, and when they are inside your ear, it feels like they are going to fall out. However, Ferraris says that after a couple of hours, you get used to the feeling, and it doesn’t bother you.

Tapping a few times on the earphones with your finger will invoke an AI persona.

For now, there are four different AI personas. One is general – like Samantha from the movie Her, a fitness coach Athena, Hector, a therapist, and Fin, a financial advisor.

I asked Athena, the fitness coach, about how could I cure my back pain, and it told me some general information about what one should do to prevent injuries - something you would expect to hear if you asked that question a ChatGPT bot.

Without your personal information, the “AI People” can't do much more than that. Ferraris said that the main goal is to give these AI personas “skills” and teach them about user’s habits.

“The skill that we are working on implementing for Athena is we want to connect her to the APIs of your health tracking devices. And when you actually talk to her and say: what's what am I supposed to do today for an exercise, she will have the context of your device, and say, well, maybe today you didn't sleep so well, so it's better if you do a lighter exercise or today,” he explained.

To ensure data privacy, the company says it will store information about users' conversations only on users’ devices. Data will be sent to the corresponding server during a conversation with LLM and deleted after the conversation is over. But the company will enable users to back up their data on the cloud or on their own servers.

The final word

While I'm not sure that I would like to wear earphones every day, the idea of talking with AI characters who can give you advice personal advice at least looks entertaining.

However, for now, the pods are only a prototype, and we will have to wait for their release to know whether the features work as intended.

According to Ferraris, the earphones will be released in Q1 and come with a subscription fee. The price is still unclear.