A new memory cartoon is waiting for me. When I open the app, I see a multipanel strip called Big Little Moments. It appears as soon as I plug the Looki AI device back in to recharge, after almost a month not wearing it. It shows moments of me at a bar with my friend in LA, watching a stage presentation, eating a meal, seeing a demo, two women sitting across from me and then just me, walking with a phone in my hand.
These moments are from two days in June, when I wore the Looki to the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. I’d been wearing it almost nonstop since April. I wore it to Apple’s WWDC, to Google I/O. I wore it to my Princeton college reunion. I wore it at home and commuting. And then I stopped.
The Looki L1 is a little black pendant, sort of watch-sized, with a camera on the front and microphones hidden somewhere. It has a clip and a lanyard. It can be worn around the neck or left propped on a desk. It’s an AI wearable but, unlike smart glasses, it has a battery that can run a whole day while intermittently recording audio and video clips. My colleague Katie Collins tried it last year, but I never got to test one out until this spring and summer.
AI wearables of all shapes and forms are everywhere now. OpenAI may be next to offer one. Some of these devices come in glasses form. Some are pendants. Some are pins. Some are earbuds. As AI keeps spreading everywhere and trying to absorb more of our personal information that it can craft into patterns and narratives, wearables are the physical form of trying to give AI eyes, ears and, increasingly, memories of your own life.
Everyone feels wary of smart glasses lately, because of the outer-facing cameras, tech’s pushy AI relentlessness and Meta’s poor reputation for privacy. When I tell people I’m wearing Meta Ray-Bans, they tend to ask me, “Is it recording me now?” I say no, then point to the Looki around my neck. “But this probably is.”
The Looki device follows in a long line of lifelogging wearables that go back over a decade. In 2014, I reviewed an occasionally recording lifelogging camera called the Narrative Clip, which promised to capture our memories. I found its memory, in practice, to be full of holes. In 2026, that’s pretty much still the case.
The Looki L1 promises a fun way to remember and record life’s moments, to have a companion to travel with you and save moments without having to record them. To be an all-day wearable camera.
But when I wore one, it made me feel awkward, like I was being a jerk or a spy. At best, it’s odd; at worst, it feels like I’m a guy with, well, an always-on camera. Which, in 2026, isn’t nearly as “fun” as it was in 2014, it turns out. I tested the Looki because I was curious, and because I’m legitimately interested in the future of assisted memory tech.
What the Looki L1 is, and isn’t
Looki L1 is an odd duck product, as many AI wearables are. The $250 lifelogging camera has no subscription, although the product team I chatted with suggested that some services could be subscription-based down the road. It uses its own proprietary AI service, and can’t hook into any other platforms such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, although it borrows models from several sources.
I do like the snap-on magnetic pendant strap that doubles as a charging dongle and can serve as a desktop stand if you want to perch it somewhere to take photos or video. The magnetic clasp works through clothing, too, so the pendant could look like a clip-on pin. But I don’t like that the Looki’s active recording LEDs are small. They’re less noticeable than those on Meta’s glasses by far.
There’s a phone app that the Looki pairs with, just as a smartwatch or pair of smart glasses would. That’s how the pendant gets its firmware updates and uploads its recorded clips to your phone and the cloud.
Looki has an “AI Mode” that stays on and intermittently records short video clips (no more than about 5 seconds each), apparently picking moments of interest. In my three months of use, it didn’t seem to have any pattern. There are dedicated buttons to trigger manual audio recordings, still photos or video recordings. There’s also a front touchpad, which I could hold down to summon a voice AI to chat with for feedback on what I’d recorded, or anything else. I rarely used it.
The Qualcomm chip on the Looki is an older watch-oriented model, but it still lasts a day on a charge. The future for pendants like these is likely even longer battery life, based on the specs of Qualcomm’s newest AI-optimized chips, released this year. These types of pendants are probably going to do even more on-device without relying on the cloud at all.
But, for the most part, the Looki is a repository. It sucks up images and videos, and then syncs them over to its companion phone app (which takes several minutes) and cloud-analyzes them later (which can take up to several hours). It’s like burying a time capsule and then digging it up later that day to see what you’ve got.
And what did I get? Mostly a hot, sometimes fascinating, often awkward mess.
As a memory maker, full of holes
The best thing the Looki does is generate comic book-like generative AI images based on things it automatically captures. The results vary in style and structure, with absolutely no discrete controls to make anything turn into a comic if you’d like it to. You just have to get lucky, I guess.
A few images of people I met, comic-transformed, are fun. A few story panel-type comics tried to distill a day, or several days, into a narrative. Sometimes they were clever (one, a map of New York and New Jersey showing me commuting, seeing tech demos and going to a Princeton reunion) felt sharable. One, of my trip to WWDC, was weirdly focused on my pre-event breakfast with my colleague Bridget Carey rather than all the hours I wore it during Apple’s keynote, which was the whole point of the day.
Sometimes the Looki auto-inserted me into images, inventing a narrative. (Since I’m wearing the pendant, I was clearly not in the picture.) My comic portrait ranged from oddly accurate to something more like Marc Maron. One comic picture of me buying a coffee at a Hyatt was inexplicably done in Minecraft-style blocks.
As for the rest of the recorded memories? There are AI-made supercuts of videos, set to odd preselected music. The tone often felt generic, and the captured videos are frequently at bad angles. When I had coffee with friends, several of the clips were accidental crotch shots. Other times, faces were cut out of the picture. (Did I need to wear the pendant higher up?)
The Looki seems to take video clips but not photos automatically, which were harder to download and share with friends. Also, a lot of the captured clips were either too brief or the people in them were discussing things that nobody approved sharing in the first place. If you’re wearing a Looki, prepare to do a lot of warning, explaining and apologizing.
Do I like having them to look over? Sort of, but so few are actually good. You can just take photos and videos when you want, rather than having the intermittently recording AI mode on. But then, if you do that, the device doesn’t feel like a true lifelog.
Sadly, a lot of the captured supercuts just showed me on my phone. Which, of course, just illustrated a sad state of my own life. I am on my phone a hell of a lot. Too much. And the comics, the autocaptures, they all tended to have at least one shot capturing me looking at my phone, since the pendant was around my neck, over and over and over.
Besides keeping these lifelog videos and autocaptures and creating comic strips, it weirdly tries to analyze meals I’ve eaten (not to any true success), and also pops occasional random notifications based on location, I think, and what the camera sees. These notifications are meant to be smart and context-aware. Sometimes they’re oddly on point (telling me I’m at AWE and reminding me of the start of the opening keynote, even though I never told it I was at AWE). Other times it just noted a store or maybe someone standing nearby. Again, like everything else the Looki does, these notifications can’t be customized at all.
As a public device, it’s embarrassing
My son has told me to take off the Looki pendant more times than I can count. My wife shamed me about my decision to wear it in a Japanese supermarket (I didn’t). People who saw it at public events, like WWDC or Google I/O, were either mildly curious or mildly offput. I awkwardly took it off a lot and stuck it in my pocket on trains, in bathrooms and, increasingly, many other places.
At a Whole Foods, someone next to me noticed it as I was shopping for chocolate bars and asked if it was recording. I explained it might be and that I test tech products for my job. They said they weren’t that upset, they knew that people are wearing cameras more and more. I didn’t believe they weren’t upset. And that reaction, too, has stuck with me. I wear smart glasses at least half the time now. Where does that put me on the socially acceptable spectrum? Don’t tell me.
I still find smart glasses less personally embarrassing, because they look and function like actual glasses. And, in reality, Meta’s glasses very infrequently record anything. While Meta has an autocapture mode for the glasses now, running it would wear out the battery fast.
The Looki, meanwhile, does nothing at all except be a AI-enabled camera pendant on your neck. To remember to charge that up and wear it, like an odd necklace that nobody asked for… I just can’t justify it. I made myself wear it for more weeks than I thought I would. Now, it’s out of batteries and sitting in a bag somewhere. I gave up.
The Looki was really just my Memory Cartoon Generator, for the most part, as you can see from all the images I shared. They’re interesting, but I can’t choose when they happen, or how they happen. And they’re not enough to keep me wearing the Looki. As you can see above, sometimes it even captured when I went to my home bathroom. (I never kept it on in an actual public bathroom, but this is exactly the nightmare stuff that the Looki embodies.)
If devices like the Looki could be actual memory assistants, deeply aware and able to help see and guide you — Or, if they were better cameras, taking photos I’d actually use — Or, if it could hook into AI services I actually semi-trusted and recognized — well, maybe. Right now, the Looki is more like a harbinger. Of glasses that really and truly will have longer battery life, someday soon, and be able to record all day long, if intermittently. And more AI pendants.
When that day happens, then yes, maybe my glasses will truly be recording all the time. And yes, that’s concerning. But even more concerning is the lack of any tech company efforts to manage privacy and deeper control over these random AI wearables. Or to elevate them beyond just gimmicks.
What I learned is I hit my limit. The Looki is not on me anymore. But the spirit of the Looki is everywhere else, coming fast.
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