A new memory cartoon awaits me. When I open the app, I see a multi-panel strip called Big Little Moments. It appears as soon as I plug the Looki AI device back in to charge it, after almost a month without wearing it. It shows moments of me at a bar with my friend in Los Angeles, watching a presentation on stage, 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’s Fair in Long Beach, California. I’ve been wearing it almost non-stop since April. I wore it to Apple WWDC, Google I/O. I wore it to my college reunion at Princeton. I wore it at home and on the go. And then I stopped.
The Looki L1 is a small black pendant, the size of a watch, with a camera on the front and microphones hidden somewhere. It has a clip and a cord. It can be worn around the neck or left on a desk. It’s an AI wearable but, unlike smart glasses, it has a battery that can run all day while intermittently recording audio and video clips. My colleague Katie Collins tried it last year, but I never got around to testing it until this spring and summer.
AI wearable devices of all shapes and forms are now everywhere. OpenAI could be the next to offer one. Some of these devices come in the form of glasses. Some are pendants. Some are pins. Some are headphones. As AI continues to spread everywhere and attempts to absorb more personal information so it can turn it into patterns and stories, wearables are the physical form to give AI eyes, ears and, increasingly, memories of your own life.
Everyone is wary of smart glasses these days, due to outward-facing cameras, the tech’s relentlessness of AI, and Meta’s poor reputation for privacy. When I tell people I wear Meta Ray-Bans, they tend to ask, “Is it recording me now?” I say no, then show the Looki around my neck. “But it probably is.”
The Looki device is part of a long line of wearable life-recording devices that dates back more than a decade. In 2014, I reviewed a casual recording camera called Narrative Clip, which promised to capture our memories. I found that his memory, in practice, was full of holes. In 2026, this is almost always the case.
The Looki L1 promises a fun way to remember and record life’s moments, have a companion to travel with you and save moments without having to record them. Be an all-day wearable camera.
But when I wore one, I felt uncomfortable, like I was a fool or a spy. At best, it’s strange; at worst, I feel like a guy with a camera always on. Which, in 2026, isn’t 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 technology.
What the Looki L1 is and what it is not
Looki L1 is an odd duck product, as many AI wearables are. The $250 lifelogging camera doesn’t have a subscription, although the product team I spoke with suggested that some services could be subscription-based in the future. It uses its own proprietary AI service and cannot connect to any other platforms such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, or Anthropic’s Claude, although it borrows models from multiple sources.
I like the snap-on magnetic dangling strap that doubles as a charging dongle and can double as a desk stand if you want to perch it somewhere to take photos or videos. The magnetic clasp also works through clothing, so the pendant could look like a clip pin. But I don’t like that the Looki’s active recording LEDs are small. They are far less visible than those on Meta’s glasses.
There’s a phone app that the Looki pairs with, just like a smartwatch or pair of smart glasses would. This is how the pendant gets its firmware updates and uploads its saved 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), seemingly selecting moments of interest. In my three months of use, there seemed to be no trend. There are dedicated buttons for triggering manual audio recordings, photos or video recordings. There’s also a front touchpad, which I can hold down to summon a voice AI to chat with and get feedback on what I’ve recorded, or anything else. I rarely used it.
The Looki’s Qualcomm chip is an older model aimed at watches, but it still lasts a day on a charge. The future of pendants like these is likely even longer battery life, based on the specifications of Qualcomm’s latest AI-optimized chips, released this year. These types of pendants will likely do even more on the device without relying on the cloud at all.
But, essentially, Looki is a repository. It sucks up images and videos, then syncs them with its companion phone app (which takes several minutes) and analyzes them in the cloud later (which can take up to several hours). It’s like burying a time capsule and digging it up later today to see what you’ve got.
And what did I get? Mostly a hot mess, sometimes fascinating, often embarrassing.
As a memory maker, full of holes
The best thing Looki does is generate cartoon-like generative AI images based on the elements it automatically captures. The results vary in style and structure, with no discrete control to turn anything into a comic if you want. You just have to be lucky, I guess.
Some images of people we met, transformed into comic strips, are amusing. A few story panel-style comics have attempted to distill a day, or several days, into a narrative. Sometimes they were clever (e.g. a map of New York and New Jersey showing me directions, tech demos, and attending a meeting in Princeton) that seemed shareable. One of my trips to WWDC was oddly 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 focal point of the day.
Sometimes the Looki automatically inserted me into images, inventing a story. (As I’m wearing the pendant, I clearly wasn’t in the photo.) My comic portrayal ranged from eerily accurate to something that looked more like Marc Maron. A comical image of me buying a coffee at a Hyatt was inexplicably rendered in Minecraft-style blocks.
As for the rest of the recorded memories? There are AI-created supershots of videos set to odd pre-selected music. The tone often seems generic and the videos captured are often from poor angles. When I was having coffee with friends, several clips were accidental crotch shots. Other times, faces were removed from the image. (Should I wear the pendant higher?)
The Looki seems to automatically take video clips but not photos, which were harder to download and share with friends. Additionally, many of the captured clips were either too brief or the people in them were discussing things that no one approved of sharing in the first place. If you wear a Looki, be prepared for lots of warnings, explanations and apologies.
Do I like having them to watch? Sort of, but so few are actually good. You can simply take photos and videos whenever you want, rather than activating AI recording mode intermittently. But then, if you do that, the device doesn’t feel like a real life diary.
Unfortunately, a lot of the captured supercuts were just shown to me on my phone. Which, of course, only illustrated a sad state of my own life. I’m on my phone a lot. Too much. And the comics, the autocaptures, they all tended to have at least one photo of me looking at my phone, since the pendant was around my neck, over and over again.
Besides keeping these life videos and auto captures and creating comics, it strangely tries to analyze meals I’ve eaten (without much success), and also shows occasional random notifications based on location, I think, and what the camera sees. These notifications are intended to be intelligent and contextual. Sometimes they’re strangely relevant (telling me I was at AWE and reminding me of the beginning of the keynote, even though I never told him I was at AWE). Other times it was just a matter of spotting a store or maybe someone nearby. Again, like everything Looki does, these notifications cannot be personalized at all.
As a public apparatus, this is embarrassing
My son has told me to take off the Looki pendant more times than I can count. My wife shamed me for my decision to wear it to a Japanese supermarket (I didn’t). People who saw it at public events, like WWDC or Google I/O, were either slightly curious or slightly upset. I have often awkwardly taken it off and put it in my pocket on trains, in toilets and, increasingly, in many other places.
At Whole Foods, someone next to me noticed it while I was buying chocolate bars and asked if it was recording. I explained that maybe that was the case and that I was testing tech products for my job. They said they weren’t that upset, that they knew people were carrying more and more cameras. I didn’t think they weren’t upset. And that reaction stayed with me, too. I wear smart glasses at least half the time now. Where does this place me on the socially acceptable spectrum? Don’t tell me.
I still find smart glasses less embarrassing personally, because they look and work like real glasses. And, in reality lity, Meta’s glasses very rarely record anything. Although Meta now has an automatic capture mode for glasses, operating it would quickly drain the battery.
The Looki, meanwhile, does nothing other than be an AI-enabled camera pendant on your neck. Remembering to charge it and wear it, like a weird necklace that no one asked for… I just can’t justify it. I forced myself to wear it for more weeks than I thought I would. Now it has no batteries and is in a bag somewhere. I gave up.
The Looki was really just my cartoon memory 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 for me to continue wearing the Looki. As you can see above, this was sometimes even captured when I went into the bathroom in my house. (I’ve never kept it in an actual public restroom, but that’s exactly the nightmare the Looki embodies.)
If devices like the Looki could be true memory assistants, deeply aware and able to help you see yourself and guide you – Or, if they were better cameras, taking photos that I would actually use – Or, if they could connect to AI services that I trusted and recognized – well, maybe. Right now, the Looki feels more like a harbinger. Glasses that will actually have longer battery life, someday soon, and be able to record all day, even intermittently. And more AI pendants.
When that day comes, then yes, maybe my glasses really will record all the time. And yes, it is concerning. But what’s even more concerning is the lack of effort from tech companies to manage privacy and greater control over these random AI wearable devices. Or to elevate them beyond simple gadgets.
What I learned is that I have reached my limit. The Looki is no longer on me. But the spirit of Looki is everywhere else and is arriving quickly.
Scott Stein
Editor-in-chief
I started at CNET reviewing laptops in 2009. I now explore wearable technology, VR/AR, tablets, gaming, and future/emerging trends in our changing world. Other obsessions include magic, immersive theater, puzzles, board games, cooking, improv, and the New York Jets. My background includes an MFA in theater which I apply to thinking about immersive experiences of the future. See full bio
