Meet Interface, a new $99 smart ring from AI and hardware startup Natura 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 the 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 the 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 would allow people to do what they want, how they ask a person.
The idea behind Interface is to help people get away from their phones while doing everyday tasks faster and naturally. At launch, Ring will connect to a number of AI agents and apps, including Meta’s Muse, Instinct, Grok Bot, Claude, ChatGPT, and more.
Pre-orders are expected to open next month, with shipping scheduled 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’ve 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 an hour of your day where you don’t have access to them. And the form factor of the ring is perfect for that because it’s basically an extension of you. You can 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 can ask the ring to track your training. When you wake up, you may wonder what’s on your schedule for the day. If you’re in the shower and realize you’re out of shampoo, you can ask the ring to order a new one. If you fall asleep while watching TV, you can say that you turn off the TV and set an alarm for the morning. After using it to record a meeting, you can ask it to send your notes from the discussion to a colleague.
Responses from agents can be delivered via connected headphones, an iPhone Live Activity or the NaturOS app.
Plus, users who rely on multiple AI agents in apps can specify which one they want to perform a particular task. For example, they can ask Claude to write code, Instinct to book a reservation, and Grok Bot 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 eventually most of the things people do on their computers will be handled by AI agents. He sees the Ring eventually replacing many tasks that currently require screens, from filling out forms and messaging apps to finding files and drafting presentations, with simple voice requests to an AI agent.
“Ultimately, the main interface between user and technology is the ring,” said Ferraris. “So it won’t be immediate, because even today not everyone has a personal agent, but I think that everyone is bound to have one. So in this first phase, we expect it to be for people who already have a personal agent, which is mostly people in tech.
Although the ring will launch at $99, Natura plans to raise the price eventually. For now, the company wants to get the device into people’s hands, build usage and create demand before they do. After an initial three to six month free period, Natura plans to charge a monthly subscription fee of $9.
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 initially price its ring lower to lower the barrier to entry and drive adoption.
In terms of 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 six to 12 days on a full charge, depending on usage, and takes 100 minutes to fully charge.
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 are about to launch is significantly different compared to any other ring out there today, because we were not only able to combine the highest quality health tracking with the rest of the components that allow agent communication and meeting recordings and external memory, but we were also able to do this with an incredibly long battery life, which is vital for a product like this, and in a size that is very, very different from a perspective, is the hardware itself.
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