Omi is a wearable pin that records the audio of your entire life. As a privacy enthusiast I won’t let it do that, but recording important team meetings, meetings with doctors or other professionals that are already making ai recordings for themselves, and recording journal entries – Omi works so well!
What’s so great about this is I don’t have to stare at my phone or type for twenty minutes to get a journal entry. I can speak it into my phone and then export a cleaned up transcript right into Obsidian. I also installed a plug-in in Obsidian that finds relevant notes whenever I’m working on another note, it creates intelligent links even if I didn’t tag it or link it directly, it’s like finding hidden connections that I hadn’t surfaced before.
Omi As A Second Brain
Organizing information is the most complex and time consuming part of building a second brain, and with Omi, I don’t have to.
Omi is open source, but exporting the content as a json file is messy. I back up important conversations to Obsidian, just in case Omi fails or dies, but it’s just a matter of copy/pasting and filing the note, and takes just a few seconds. Because the process of creating the content has become frictionless I have a few more seconds to invest in figuring out a good enough place to store the information.
Unlike Obsidian, Omi chats back. I can ask it detailed questions about our conversations and it will remember and find the missing information.
One thing I’ve noticed while using Omi for meetings is that a 30 or 60 minute meeting can be condensed to a few bullet points. Participants spend an hour talking around a subject and at the end of it, there are 15 points that were discussed. I’m not sure why were like that, or if it’s good or bad… imagine if tv shows were 4 minutes long and there was nothing but a guy reading bullet points. It’s be stupid, nobody would watch it.
Maybe humans just need all the fluff around the content to enjoy the experience. Either way, for a meeting, getting to the meat of it quickly is important and sometimes after 60 minutes of talking around a subject, I have no idea what the meeting was actually about, because the content is drowning in context. Omi doesn’t have a problem pulling out those points.
Caution
I think being able to remember information without an AI is ideal, but human memory has always been unreliable with concrete information. With Omi, information recorded is extremely granular. I think it’s still a good idea to write down important things and refresh our memories with them by re-reading or repeating the information from time to time, but the amount of detail you can pull from Omi is wild.
It’s important to use our brains to actively listen and recall information, and having Omi listening in the background has made me more aware of it.
Often after reviewing omi’s notes I see points I completely missed. I had gotten distracted, or zoned out. I think being more aware is healthy, thinking I don’t have to pay attention to meetings or conversations anymore is not a good habit to get in to.
I’m going to be using Omi as a failsafe, not as a machine that handles thinking and memory for me, but as an aid with a much higher sampling rate than my brain.
In a way, it frees my brain up for associative thinking while actively listening to a conversation, rather than having to focus on remembering every important detail. I’ll have to think more about how Omi changes the experience of human interaction.