This week at IFA, the show has been telling us that “the future is…AI,” which we’ve been hearing for a few years, and we all hate it. But I did get a chance to check out some AI hardware that doesn’t suck, and I think it’s going to be fairly popular.
I’m talking about Relay Q. It’s a modular push-to-talk gadget that uses AI to handle various tasks. So, at first, I was pretty skeptical about it. It’s sort of like having WhisprFlow or Google’s Rambler on another gadget that you’d naturally hold closer to your mouth when talking.
You can use it to do voice-to-text for sending messages in different apps like WhatsApp, but you can also ramble, like you can with Google’s Rambler. So you can say in the message, “tell him…” and Relay will know that you are messaging “him” and won’t include that much text.
A few other examples that one of the founders of Relay, Raymond Zhu, showed me today include recommending a restaurant to the person you’re messaging; Gemini (the AI model behind Relay) will search Google and pull up a Google Maps link for you. This takes a little longer than just simple voice-to-text, since the AI is actually searching for something.
Honestly, this is something I could see myself using a whole lot more than I thought I would before seeing this demo. And the hardware is quite small. What I saw was not the final product; it was an early prototype, so Relay is still a ways off from actually shipping this one, unfortunately. But they are planning to launch in three color options.
For a bit of background, we were sitting outside the Messe in Berlin, where loud techno music was playing, other people were talking, and water fountains were going off. Quite a busy sound background, and Relay Q was still able to pick up everything being said into the mic. That’s one big advantage of this being in a piece of hardware small enough to bring up to your mouth whenever you want to use it.
Relay Q likely won’t launch until Q1 2027
Zhu informed me that we will see another demo of Relay Q at CES in January, and a launch should follow shortly after. This was a pretty early demo of what Relay Q can do, and to be honest, I was really impressed.
Right now, the team is targeting $150 for the Relay Q, and there will be a subscription for unlimited use priced at $15 per month. These things could change before launch, but Zhu was very adamant about keeping an “unlimited usage” option for users, so they don’t have to worry about when to use Relay Q, and can just use it as they wish.
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