Skip the keyboard and skip the dictation: a California startup called Sabi says it will ship a wool hat that lets you type by thinking, and it wants the first ones on heads before the year is out. The company came out of stealth this week with a pitch described in a Wired profile of its plan to build a cyborg-for-everyone wearable, backed by Khosla Ventures.
The beanie (a baseball cap version is also in the works) is an EEG rig — the old-school method of picking up brainwaves with metal disks pressed against the scalp. EEG has been used for decades in sleep labs and epilepsy clinics. The trouble is that skin and skull muffle the signal, so readings from outside the head have never been sharp enough to catch continuous inner speech.
Sabi's bet is brute force. Most EEG caps have a dozen to a couple hundred sensors. Sabi is cramming in 70,000 to 100,000 tiny ones, and feeding the noisy output to what CEO Rahul Chhabra calls a "brain foundation model." To train it, the company collected roughly 100,000 hours of recordings from a pool of 100 volunteers. The target at launch is 30 words per minute.
Investor Vinod Khosla, who put early money into OpenAI, told Wired that a wearable is the only way a billion people will ever use a brain-computer interface: "If you're going to have a billion people use BCI for access to their computers every day, it can't be invasive." Chhabra says neural readings get encrypted end-to-end before they leave the hat, and that Stanford neurosecurity researchers are auditing the stack.
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