Natura’s $99 smart ring puts AI agents on your finger

Meet Interface, a new $99 smart ring from AI and hardware startup Natura that’s designed for the era of AI agents. With a press of your finger, you can ask an AI agent to complete a task, capture thoughts, and get things done without reaching for your phone. And while AI is at the heart of Interface, the ring also doubles as a health tracker, as it monitors metrics like heart rate, HRV, sleep, and activity.

The startup was founded by Carlo Edoardo Ferraris, who previously founded tech accessories company Rolling Square. After years of building consumer hardware, he became convinced that rapidly advancing AI needed a new kind of interface that lets people ask for what they want the way they’d ask a person.

The idea behind Interface is to help people look up from their phones while getting everyday tasks done more quickly and naturally. At launch, the ring will connect with a range of AI agents and apps, including Meta’s Muse, Instinct, Grokbot, Claude, ChatGPT, and more. 

Pre-orders are expected to open next month, with shipping slated for December or January.

The smart ring was not the company’s first product. Those were HumanPods, a pair of AI-enabled earbuds designed to let users interact with AI agents. But Natura believed it needed a new form factor built for the latest advances in voice technology.

“Over time, we evolved to an understanding where you really want to have access to your agents 24/7,” Ferraris told TechCrunch in an interview. “You don’t want to have even one hour of your day where you cannot access them. And the form factor of the ring is perfect for this because it’s basically an extension of you. You can go shower with it; you can sleep with it. You never take it off.”

The company says the use cases are endless. If you’re out for a run, you could ask the ring to start tracking your workout. When you wake up, you could ask what’s on your schedule for the day. If you’re in the shower and realize you’re out of shampoo, you could ask the ring to reorder it. If you’re falling asleep while watching TV, you could tell it to turn off the TV and set an alarm for the morning. After using it to record a meeting, you could ask it to send your notes from the discussion to a coworker.

Responses from agents can be delivered through connected headphones, an iPhone Live Activity, or the NatureOS app. 

Plus, users who rely on multiple AI agents and apps can specify which one they want to handle a particular task. For example, they could ask Claude to write code, Instinct to book a reservation, and Grokbot to take care of something else.

In addition to controlling AI agents, users can control their devices, including their computers. Ferraris says he believes that, ultimately, most of the things people do on their computers will be handled through AI agents. He sees the ring eventually replacing many tasks that currently require screens, from filling out forms and messaging in apps to finding files and drafting presentations, with simple voice requests to an AI agent.

“Ultimately, the main interface between users and technology is going to be the ring,” Ferraris said. “So it’s not going to be immediate because even today, not everybody has a personal agent, but I think everybody is bound to have one. So in this first phase, we expect it’s going to be for the people that already have a personal agent, which is mostly people in tech. But eventually, I think within a year, more or less, most people will have a personal agent.”

Although the ring will launch at $99, Natura plans to eventually raise the price. For now, the company wants to get the device into people’s hands, build usage, and create demand before doing so. After an initial three- to six-month free period, Natura plans to charge a $9 monthly subscription fee. 

The company says the ring’s manufacturing costs are comparable to those of products like the Oura Ring and Samsung Galaxy Ring because they use many of the same components. However, Natura plans to price its ring lower initially to reduce the barrier to entry and drive adoption. 

As for health tracking, the ring tracks heart rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, different sleep stages, daily movement and step count, and skin temperature over time.

The company says the ring can last 6 to 12 days on a full charge, depending on usage, and takes 100 minutes to fully recharge.

While the smart ring market is filled with health-focused offerings from companies like Oura, Ultrahuman, and RingConn, as well as AI-focused ones from companies like Pebble and Vocci, Ferraris believes Interface stands out by combining both worlds.

“This ring that we’re about to launch is significantly different compared to any other ring out there today because we were able to combine not only the highest quality health tracking with the rest of the components that allow for agent communication and meeting recordings and external memory, but we were also able to do that with an incredibly long battery life, which is vital for a product like this, and in a size that is very, very small. The product itself is, from a hardware perspective, very different from anything else that’s out there.”