Key Takeaways
- Limitless records all the audio you hear and processes it with AI.
- It’s from the same company behind the Rewind app that records everything on your computer.
- Recording everybody around you, all day long, could be a privacy nightmare.
Remember Rewind, the app that recorded everything that happened on your computer so you could search it later? Now Rewind has turned into a wearable pin called Limitless AI, and it records everything—and everyone—around you.
Like Rewind, Limitless looks both incredibly useful and also quite scary. It’s a Mac app, a Windows app, and a web app, plus a clip-on microphone called the Pendant, that records your meetings and interactions and transcribes them. Then, using AI tools, it automatically creates notes and summaries, which you can search through later. And unlike the Humane AI Pin, which tries to do everything and fails, the hyper-focussed Limitless looks like it does a great job of one thing. But is it worth the privacy tradeoffs?
“The privacy concerns raised by any non-obvious recording device might not be limitless, but they’re pretty vast. In this case, the fact that there’s a feature called ‘consent mode’ for new voices that would be recorded, but that mode (according to media reports) is off by default, is a troubling signal about respect for privacy. We already live in a world in which people distrust so much of the technology around them; in order to build trust, privacy, at least, needs to be the default in design.” Irina Raicu, director of internet ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, told Lifewire via email.
Expectation of Privacy
Recording and transcribing meetings can be incredibly useful. When I do Zoom interviews and the like, I start the Voice Memos app on my phone and leave it next to the computer to capture both sides of the conversation. Later, I use a transcription tool so I can quickly search and copy sections for my articles. The big difference is, it’s a manual process, and I ask my interviewee before recording.
The Limitless Pendant does not do this. The Pendant has a “consent mode,” which will ignore any new voices until you explicitly tell it to record them, but this mode is off by default. It could end up getting stymied by podcast playback, for example. Limitless also uploads encrypted data to the cloud, from where it is made available to all your connected devices.
The biggest concern is the fact that it ‘records everything around you.’
The problem with this always-on recording is that it is capturing people who may not have been given to opportunity to opt-in.
“The biggest concern is the fact that it ‘records everything around you.’ This means that in addition to the risk of it listening to your private conversations or information that you wouldn’t want transcribed, it also poses the same risks for those who happen to be around you,” cybersecurity CEO Ryan Smith told Lifewire via email.
Single-Serve
By adopting a narrow purpose, Limitless (which can be used with or without the Pendant brooch) can focus on one task, like smart transcription, instead of trying to be a voice assistant, an AI camera, and everything else, and failing. AI tools seem to be best when they are limited. OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool, for example, is amazing, whereas its Chat GPT AI chatbot “can’t stop lying.”
“In my opinion, AI excels when it’s used for narrower, more specialized tasks. Creating an AI to learn behaviors or speech patterns of a user is something well within the realm of typical AI development. When you add more features (and therefore data) for the AI to learn, you risk diluting the AI to something that performs a lot of different things, but doesn’t perform any of those things well,” says Smith.
In my opinion, AI excels when it’s used for narrower, more specialized tasks
The service really shines when you capture absolutely everything around you throughout the day, because you never know when you might need to go back and check on something. A forgotten name of a new acquaintance, or the title of a book somebody recommended to you. And future features are easy to imagine: It could identify any and all music that you hear, and put that into a note (or even a playlist). It might identify speakers so you know who you met that day. And so on. You can use the app and service for free (with ten hours of AI features), or pay $20 per month for the unlimited version.
But for regular folks, this might just be a little too far. You might be fine with having everything captured, but what about all those folks around you? And even if you enable consent mode, how will they know? We’re only just getting started with all this AI business, but it’s already turning into a moral and privacy nightmare, which is probably only going to get worse until we see some laws to protect us.
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- This Always-Recording AI Microphone Will Make Your Coworkers Hate You
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