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Meet Vi, an AI personal trainer who lives in biosensing earphones. She finds your ideal path to fitness and coaches you in real time.
About this project
A great trainer makes working out 10x more motivating, fun, and effective. That’s why we created Vi—an evolving personal trainer who lives in bio-sensing earphones. Put Vi on and start a relationship with a friend for your fitness.
Each day, Vi tracks you, gets smarter, and coaches you to real results. Vi will help you meet your weight goals or improve your run. Plus, enjoy your favorite music and talk on the phone without ever touching a single button.
We invited people to try a working demo of Vi. Watch people's reactions as they try Vi for the first time.
With Vi, you’ll always know: how fast to run, how far to go, how high to climb, how hard to push. She'll tell you real-time insights to keep you on track to your goals.
We designed VI as a neckband because it allows you to comfortably enjoy the full benefits of Vi all day long: Beautiful-sounding music, phone calls, all day activity tracking unification – to name a few. Vi gives you SO MUCH MORE than current fitness wearables and headphones.
Vi comes with an iOS & Android app for use both during and off training. During a workout, the app provides you with progress feedback in quick, glance-friendly screens. Outside of workouts, use the app to set your training plans, review progress, and customize Vi.
Scott Wilson and his award-winning product development and brand incubation firm, MINIMAL, played an instrumental role in shaping Vi’s form and ergonomics. Scott and his awesome team collaborated with our industrial design team to prototype and test Vi on a wide variety of bodies to ensure support for a range of all anatomical sizes and shapes.
Vi comes with a set of in-ear fins that stabilize and hold your earbuds in place, even during vigorous workout activity. Also, Vi includes a range of ear gel sizes to ensure a custom fit that’s comfortable for extended wear.
For our first release, we’ll focus on creating a complete experience focused for RUNNING. We want to get Vi right for this sport before we stretch into every part of your active life. In subsequent releases, we’ll expand Vi’s capabilities into more activities.
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Risks and challenges
Risks and challenges
Luckily, we have a proven track record of delivering high-quality products to some of the most demanding clients in the world-- like NASA, the Air force and iconic consumer brands. We have years of figuring this stuff out behind us.
We have been working on Vi for over 18 months and developed key parts-- like the industrial design, AI design, and software-- with a team of dedicated experts.
The main challenges we see from here are:
Product endurance in all usage environments
Our AI runs a complex operating system which requires powerful processing capabilities, multiple data inputs, and smart power management. Balancing those needs with battery life is a top priority. We’re working tirelessly to make sure you get a small, long-lasting device. We’ve extensively QA’ed past projects and created automated tools to simulate all possible scenarios, in order to build the best battery for the job.
AI
We’re committed to having the most natural AI/human interactions, and making sure we create a seamless user experience. We have some of the best experts in the field who are working to ensure you get the highest quality interaction with Vi. Any time we see a sub-optimal experience due to prematurity, we find practical ways of addressing it. We weigh whether it’s better to take the feature out to improve focus, or replace the AI vocal/textual interaction with a more straightforward interaction.
Supply Chain/Mass Production
No risk here really. Since we’ve done this before we have existing relationships with manufacturers. We are confident that they will be able to handle the challenge of bringing many physical devices to the world.
With your help we can make it happen!
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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While the Vi device and hardware is designed for basically any type of sports activity (including cycling, gym and much more), version 1 of the full Vi training experience will focus on running. We are looking to add more activities based on what our backers are interested in. Please leave a comment and let us know what activities you’d like added in the future.
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Yes, absolutely! Vi will help train all levels of walkers and runners.
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Yes. You’ll need to bring your phone so that the companion app can start and stop your workout, track biometrics, measure and store your data, track features like elevation and GPS, and play your music while you train. Vi will communicate information with your phone using bluetooth. However, if you wish you can still use your Vi device for biometric tracking when paired with smart and sport watches (you can import your data to the Vi app afterwards), or to listen to music when paired with music players. But without the Vi companion app, you won’t get the full Vi training experience.
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Yes and here are some of the apps that we are working to include: Fitbit, Jawbone, Strava, Runkeeper, Map My Fitness, Endomundo, Misfit, Pebble, Garmin, and Withings. If your favorite app is not listed here, you can try to import your data through Google Kit and Apple Health Kit and then have Vi pull your data from there.
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The Kickstarter price is dependent on your pledge level. The first batch will ship in December, and the second in January. Retail price in stores will be around $249 to $299 at most retailers.
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At this stage Vi will only speak English, but we may expand and add more languages in the future.
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No, but you can use your favorite turn-by-turn directions app in the background, like Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Waze, and Vi will continue to give you a full immersive vocal experience.
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Vi is not able to be paired to two devices simultaneously at this time, however we are working on this feature in the future.
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Currently, Vi is only compatible with all Bluetooth devices.
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Vi has 8+ hours of battery life when being used in active / training mode, and up to 12 hours when in resting mode to stream music or answer calls.