Meta's latest acquisition suggests hardware plans beyond glasses and headsets
Meta has acquired Limitless, the maker of an AI-powered "Pendant," to work on building consumer hardware for the company, the startup announced via a YouTube video and blog post. So far, Meta has focused on selling VR headsets and AI smart glasses. Now the company seems interested in branching out."Meta recently announced a new vision to bring personal superintelligence to everyone and a key part of that vision is building incredible AI-enabled wearables. We share this vision and we'll be joining Meta to help bring our shared vision to life," Limitless CEO Dan Siroker said in the post announcing the acquisition.Limitless' first product was Rewind, desktop productivity software that recorded everything you did on your computer and turned it into a searchable database you interacted with via a chatbot. The company later expanded into hardware with Pendant, essentially a clip-on Bluetooth microphone that applies the same concept (privacy concerns be damned) to the things you say or hear throughout the day.The company plans to support its existing Pendant customers "for at least another year," but will no longer sell the wearable going forward. Current customers will be able to access all the features of Pendant without having to pay for a subscription, though Limitless says availability will vary per region. If you have data stored with Limitless and don’t want to hold onto your Pendant, you're now also able to export or delete your data if you choose.AI wearables focused on recording audio have emerged as a common form factor primarily because they lean on two things AI models do moderately well: transcribing audio into text and summarizing it. Meta dipping its toes into the space makes sense, if only because not everyone will want to wear glasses to receive the benefits of an AI assistant. Amazon acquired an AI wearable company called Bee in July 2025, presumably with similar intentions.Add in Meta's recent hiring of former Apple design lead Alan Dye, and you can start to imagine where things might be headed. In the future, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and Meta Ray-Ban Display could be two entries in a larger lineup of AI-powered wearables.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/metas-latest-acquisition-suggests-hardware-plans-beyond-glasses-and-headsets-212930339.html?src=rss
