Scriben AI Ballpoint Pen Refuses To Act Like Other ‘Unnecessary’ AI Devices

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Tech companies love inventing new objects for you to carry around. Smart glasses, AI pins, little pucks you clip to your shirt that light up when they’re listening. Every year there’s a new shape competing for a spot in your pocket, and every year most of them simply disappear from group chats about gadgets that didn’t pan out. Meanwhile, the actual bottleneck in most professional days has nothing to do with a missing gadget. It’s the stubborn, unsexy fact that you cannot fully listen to someone and write down what they said at the same time.

The answer Scriben landed on was already sitting in the room. Instead of building a new device, they picked the one in your bag, your blazer pocket, or rolling around your desk drawer: a pen. Nobody in a meeting side-eyes you for picking one up, which is sort of the whole premise. It writes like a pen, sits in a room like a pen, and does considerably more thinking than a pen has any right to. Behind it is Sleepmind, Inc., led by Yidi Xu, a SPCr-backed founder whose previous job was helping build Microsoft Copilot.

Designer: Yidi Xu, Founder & CEO, Sleepmind, Inc.

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Silver or matte black, 0.6mm ballpoint, leather sleeve, and a single button: the Scriben pen’s spec sheet reads like a design school constraint exercise. It ships with a quick-start guide and writes on any paper with a standard ballpoint refill. The pen records audio but doesn’t attempt to digitize handwriting, unlike the Nuwa Pen’s handwriting-scanning approach, which put it in a different product category entirely. A USB-C port hides under the top cap, and the entire interaction model is that one button: press it and the pen records locally, storing up to 18 hours of audio on 64GB of onboard storage, roughly 400 hours total, offline, with no phone required. It has won a Red Dot Design Concept award, which evaluates design intent before production rather than a shipped product, and a 2026 MUSE Design Awards Silver in Product Design.

Xu spent years at Microsoft watching genuinely capable AI keep routing people back to a screen. Her training at Tsinghua, followed by an MBA at Wharton, crystallized one design instinct above all: solve the problem at the root, not the surface. The root problem was the habit of asking people to adopt new behaviors in exchange for intelligence that was supposed to simplify their lives. “AI should learn how you work,” she says, “not the other way around.” That inversion is Scriben’s entire design brief in one sentence.

Saying no to a feature is a design decision, and Sleepmind made a lot of them. No screen on the pen, no LED readout, no haptic patterns to decode, no mode-switching between recording and writing. If a feature made the object feel more impressive but the interaction more demanding, it got cut. This is the philosophy sometimes called calm technology: tools that operate in your peripheral awareness rather than demanding your foreground attention. YD has covered a growing wave of products chasing the same idea, from the Flowtica Scribe’s agentic recording approach and the MedPen’s secure capture pitch to SwitchBot’s clip-on wearable format, and Scriben is the first where the deliberate omissions feel like the actual design story, and honestly, that’s harder to pull off than it sounds.

Most AI recorders stop at capture: record, transcribe, surface a summary, repeat. The gap Scriben targets is everything that happens after, the follow-up email, the task that needs logging, the decision from last Tuesday that reappears in Thursday’s conversation with no context attached. The system builds persistent memory across recordings, not a library of audio files but an evolving understanding of your work, your people, and your open commitments. Transcription covers 85 languages, with speaker diarization that resolves names when the system has enough context to match voices to identities. Xu is explicit that this memory needs to be vertical: what matters to a lawyer is different from what matters to a sales executive, and treating every professional’s context the same way is a failure of design, not just technology.

Scriben can draft the follow-up, prepare a document, or queue a task, but nothing leaves without a human sign-off first. This prepare, review, approve model treats autonomy as a governance decision rather than a default setting, which is a more honest framing of AI agency than the usual pitch that it just handles everything. The system connects to Gmail, Outlook, and over 9,000 tools through Zapier, generates a Morning Brief each morning built from your accumulated context, and supports Model Context Protocol letting it feed verified context to Claude, ChatGPT, and Zoom AI Companion. The intelligence sits in the middle; the person stays at both ends.

A pen that records conversations raises a real question before it raises any features. The social optics are context-dependent: a partner meeting at a law firm is a different environment from a first client call or a medical consultation. Scriben is clear that following applicable consent laws is the user’s responsibility, not the product’s. What the design does control is data architecture: audio is captured and stored locally until the user actively chooses to sync, so nothing streams to a server the moment you press the button. That’s a meaningfully different posture from most cloud-first recorders, and it matters considerably to anyone working in a regulated field.

Scriben is available now at scriben.ai in silver and matte black, both shipping with a leather sleeve and a quick-start guide in the box. Xu frames the pen as the first expression of a larger ambition: a multimodal context layer that understands professional work across sources, formats, and industries, compounding over time. If that thesis holds, the most capable AI in your next meeting might turn out to be the object you’ve been reaching for your whole career. And it may just also be the perfect Christmas gift for that difficult-to-gift-for family-member or friend with a corporate job and an obsession with productivity.

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AULA’s Neos 75 keyboard has a tiny hi-fi deck bolted to the side

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A company named after a tarantula just launched a keyboard with finishes named after gods, and I’m still processing it. AULA’s Chinese name translates to tarantula, and the brand built its reputation on RGB-soaked gaming boards that cost less than a decent pizza night. Creepy-crawly branding and rainbow lighting were basically the whole identity. Then the Neos 75 showed up with an all-aluminum body, metal keycaps, a color screen, and a launch manifesto about the Renaissance. Somewhere inside AULA, a team of designers clearly read a little too much art history, and I’m thrilled about it.

The Neos 75 comes from AULA.New Renaissance, a new in-house team of product designers, structural engineers, and keyboard nerds, and it’s their first product. It’s a 75% low-profile mechanical keyboard with 84 keys, a CNC-machined aluminum chassis, and custom Kailh switches. The party trick sits on the right, where a color screen, two slotted metal knobs, and chunky round media buttons form a console that looks borrowed from a Teenage Engineering synth. Preorders opened in China on October 23, with a global release listed as coming soon.

Designer: AULA.New Renaissance

A Tiny Hi-Fi Deck Lives on the Right Side

Two slotted metal knobs crown the console, each shaped like an oversized screw head you could almost turn with a coin. The upper one is removable and damped, handling volume and mute. The lower knob flips through screen pages and even pulls up a built-in calculator, which spreadsheet people will appreciate more than they’ll admit. Below them sit three round metal buttons for rewind, pause, and fast-forward, plus a pill-shaped NÉOS button and a small round key. All of these controls can be remapped in AULA’s driver.

That cluster recalls Dieter Rams’s Braun radios and record players of the 1950s and 1960s, with their round buttons and tidy control layouts. The same influence runs through Teenage Engineering’s OP-1, the OP-1 Field, and the all-black OP-XY. The Neos 75 borrows that visual language and places a 2.3-inch, 480 × 360 color display beside the controls, showing the clock, battery level, and artwork. The whole corner looks like a portable music player attached to a keyboard. Some Chinese forum users called the console a lump, but I’d call it the entire personality.

Dressed Like a Museum Piece, Named Like a Pantheon

AULA CNC-machines the one-piece chassis from aluminum, then finishes it in one of four colors named after deities. Venus is anodized silver, Hades anodized black, Selene anodized gray, and Athena gets an electrophoretic white coating. Bonus mythology lesson: Venus is Roman, so one deity snuck in from the neighbors. The keycaps are aluminum too, flat around the edges with a gentle curve in the center. Full metal keycaps are still a rarity on mass-produced boards, and on a walnut desk the whole thing looks like it belongs in a museum gift shop.

AULA’s manifesto argues that the Renaissance put people back at the center of the world five centuries ago, and that the Neos 75 now puts the keyboard back in human hands. It’s a big claim for a typing device, and the copywriting got roasted online. The details are more interesting. Lowercase legends like “ho.me” and “p.up” give the keys a playful voice, and “Reason & Emotion” is printed on the Enter key. A line of text runs along the spacebar, and the screen’s default face pairs the clock with a glowing statue. Teardowns also show a custom curve across the letter keys and fold-out feet.

Gasket Guts and a Price Tag Worth Talking About

Inside, a gasket mount cushions the typing assembly, backed by layers of PORON foam, an IXPE switch pad, and a PET sheet intended to shape the sound. The switches are custom low-profile units built with Kailh, sitting in hot-swappable sockets, with linear and tactile options available. The board supports wired, 2.4GHz, and Bluetooth connections, with a 4,200mAh battery housed in its own compartment. VIA compatibility and AULA’s A HUB 3.0 software provide remapping options on Windows and macOS. The board measures about 14.7 × 4.8 × 1.2 inches (372.8 × 122.3 × 29.65mm), including the extra console.

China preorders opened at ¥1,299.1 (roughly $180), down from a list price of ¥1,599.1 (about $225). Official US pricing hasn’t been announced, and AULA lists the global launch as coming soon. This is the brand’s first move into four-figure RMB pricing, putting it up against low-profile favorites like the NuPhy Air75 and the Lofree Flow. Neither combines a screen, metal knobs, and aluminum keycaps in one package.

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A rare Sony Walkman now powers this gorgeous wooden cassette tape wall

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Cassettes are selling again, which means more people own tapes and have nowhere sensible to put them. US buyers picked up 436,400 cassettes in 2023 according to Luminate, up from about 80,000 in 2015, and storage has mostly stayed stuck in the plastic-rack era. Love Hultén’s fix is a wall-mounted unit built for a client named Melted Veldt, combining a rack for around 54 tapes with a player built from a late-1990s Sony Walkman WM-EX655. Up top, a brushed aluminum panel holds a tiny oscilloscope screen, a speaker grille, and keyboard-style transport keys. Hang it up, slide in a tape, and your music collection becomes the decor.

Hultén works out of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has spent years turning old tech into handmade wooden oddities, from an IBM-inspired tape cabinet to a crane-driven record player. This piece is calmer than most of his work, but the details are pure Hultén. Engraved lines on the faceplate connect the knobs and buttons like a circuit diagram. The oscilloscope wiggles along to whatever’s playing, which is useless in the best possible way. A slot under the screen shows off the current tape’s J-card, so guests know exactly what you’re making them listen to.

Designer: Love Hultén

Sony built the WM-EX655 between 1997 and 1999, wrapping it in a diamond-patterned aluminum shell it claimed was 2.8 times tougher than its predecessor’s. It also packed auto reverse and Dolby B, a noise reduction system that tamed the hiss every tape fan knows by heart. Hultén mounts the mechanism behind a rounded window, so you can watch the reels spin while the music plays. He said this would probably be his last such build, since grade-A Walkmans are getting hard to source. Battery figures for this unit aren’t public, though his original C-52 reportedly managed more than 40 hours per charge, which is long enough to forget where the cable lives.

Brushed aluminum, a gridded speaker grille, and a screen with rounded corners recall 1960s and 1970s electronics, when Braun radios and portable TVs made metal panels feel like the future. The transport keys are sculpted like mechanical keyboard caps, three in gray and one colored play key that stands out at a glance. Two toggle switches marked PW-ON and CH-ON sit above them, next to a red indicator LED. Two small aluminum knobs sit under the screen, each set into an engraved dial reminiscent of an old TV’s tuning controls. The panel looks complicated from across the room, but up close, the controls are straightforward.

Below the deck, three columns of slots hold roughly 54 cassettes, each lying flat with its spine facing out. Hultén made a point of the horizontal storage in his post, and it turns the collection into something you browse like a bookshelf. Judging by the standard cassette cases, I estimate the whole unit stands about 25 inches tall and 15 inches wide (roughly 65 x 38 cm). That makes it a bit shorter than the C-52, which measured about 31 x 14 x 3 inches (78 x 35 x 7 cm) and used dual round speakers instead of a single grille. The flat top doubles as a tiny shelf, already home to a vase and a spare clear tape.

If you just want to play tapes, FiiO’s CP13 costs around $90, with an aluminum shell that nods to Sony’s original 1979 TPS-L2 Walkman. Your tapes still need somewhere to go, though. Hultén’s piece keeps the player and the collection together, with every spine on display. This one is a one-off commission for Melted Veldt and isn’t for sale, but if cassettes keep selling like this, I hope somebody builds a production version and copies the keycaps exactly.

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This Printer-shaped Chair Has Receipts… Literally!

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Somewhere along the way, the internet decided that “receipts” means proof. Screenshots of your ex’s texts are receipts. That old tweet a celebrity forgot to delete is a receipt. Muddycap, the anonymous South Korean designer who keeps turning random objects into chairs, has gone back to the original meaning and made one you can sit on. Or at least imagine sitting on. The Receipt Chair is a thermal receipt printer blown up to armchair size, and the paper spitting out of it is your backrest. Consider this my receipt for being a lifelong Muddycap fan.

Like much of Muddycap’s work, the chair is a 3D render, and it’s convincing enough that you’ll double-check. The details come straight from the black POS printers sitting at checkout counters across America. A glossy shell forms the armrests, one of which hides the paper roll behind a smoked window, while a leather-look cushion fills the seat. The charcoal base gets vents, a rocker power switch, and little green and red LEDs. Up top, the receipt rolls out in a big white loop with a blurred-out total, a barcode, and MUDDYCAP CHAIRS printed across the bottom. I’m choosing to believe the total is blurred because the price would make me faint.

Designer: Muddycap

Countertop thermal printers like Epson’s TM-T20 are designed to sit beside a register and vanish into the background, all matte black plastic, a flip-up lid, and a paper slot. Nobody buys one for its looks. Muddycap keeps those utilitarian details, including the parts a chair has zero use for. The vents, the switch, and the two status lights do nothing for your backside, yet they’re why your brain reads “printer” a split second before it reads “chair.”

As a seat, the proportions look generous. The deep, low cushion and tall armrests suggest a club chair for sinking in with a drink rather than sitting upright with a laptop. Thermal paper naturally curls off the roll, and Muddycap uses that curl as a reclined backrest that rises behind your shoulders before sweeping over toward the paper bay. A real version might use molded polypropylene or thin powder-coated steel to recreate that curve, though the renders don’t establish how it would be built. The loop hangs well behind the seat, so this looks like a terrible wall-hugger.

Designers have been turning everyday objects into seating for decades. Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni turned a tractor seat into the Mezzadro stool in 1957, and Studio65 turned a pair of lips into the Bocca sofa in 1970. Muddycap plays the same game with a digital-era twist, building a running series of chairs out of the gadgets and interfaces we stare at all day. His Low Battery Chair turned your phone’s most stressful icon into seating, and a three-seater shaped like a mixing-desk fader borrowed its form from audio gear. The Receipt Chair fits right in, celebrating the piece of paper your Apple Pay tap can still produce.

Hypebeast once profiled Muddycap under a headline about chairs that can’t be sat on, and he has talked about eventually producing some of his designs. If this one ever makes the jump, I already know where it belongs: right by the checkout lanes of a big-box store, where tired shoppers waiting on a price check can finally sit down. Until then, the renders live on his Instagram.

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Porsche made an espresso machine with La Marzocco, and this one has the Carrera’s ducktail

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Back in 1972, Porsche needed a way to keep the 911’s rear end planted at high speeds, and the answer was a little upturned spoiler that everyone promptly nicknamed the ducktail. Fifty-four years later, that same ducktail is holding up your espresso cups. Progress! The aerodynamics probably don’t count for much on a kitchen counter, but the vibes count for a lot, especially at 7 a.m. when you need all the help you can get.

This is the second time Porsche and La Marzocco have teamed up, and this round honors the 911 Carrera RS 2.7, arguably the most worshipped 911 ever built. The canvas is once again La Marzocco’s Linea Micra, now dressed in three historic Porsche liveries with Carrera RS script, engraved knobs, and a plaque reminding you that yours is one of 911. Your morning flat white just got a racing number.

 

Designers: Porsche & La Marzocco

Your Countertop Just Got a Racing Livery

The cleverest thing about this collab is how literally it maps the car onto the machine. Most original RS cars left the factory in Grand Prix White with colored Carrera script down the sides and wheels painted to match. Here, the white body plays the bodywork, the colored base stands in for those wheels, and the Carrera RS script runs along the lower panel, echoing its placement on the car. The Tangerine version flips the formula with an orange body and a black base, and it looks fantastic next to a real Tangerine RS. Fun math: only 60 White and Green RS cars were ever built, so the green coffee machines will outnumber them about fifteen to one.

Then come the little details, which is where Porsche nerds will happily lose an afternoon. The cup rail on top takes its shape from the ducktail. The black knobs carry laser-engraved “RS” and “2.7” caps, as though the machine is quietly reciting its own spec sheet. The analog pressure gauges get red and green indicators styled after Porsche instruments, and a magnetic “RS 2.7” badge sits on the side panel like a race roundel. Finally, a plaque reading “One of 911” makes sure no houseguest misses the limited-edition status.

A Proper La Marzocco Under All That Paint

Strip away the livery and you’ve got the Linea Micra, the compact home espresso machine La Marzocco launched in 2022. It’s a dual-boiler setup, meaning one boiler handles espresso while a second handles steam, so you can pull a shot and froth milk at the same time. The brew boiler holds 0.25 liters and the steam boiler holds 1.6 liters. The whole thing measures roughly 13 inches high, 11 inches wide, and 15 inches deep, and weighs about 42 pounds. It’s compact, but you probably won’t want to shuffle it around the counter every morning.

The everyday features are where the Micra earns its keep. A convertible 3-in-1 portafilter switches between single-spout, double-spout, and bottomless setups, so you can watch your extraction or simply make coffee. The brew paddle gives you the tactile flick of a classic lever, with an electric switch doing the work underneath. You also get an insulated steam wand, an easy-to-reach two-liter water tank, and LED barista lights for those foggy 6 a.m. shots. The La Marzocco Home app handles temperature adjustments and lets you schedule warm-up before your alarm goes off.

$7,911, 911 Units, and One Very Tiny Model Car

Now for the part that stings a little. The Porsche x La Marzocco Linea Micra costs $7,911 in the US (yes, they snuck a 911 into the price tag too), while a regular Linea Micra sells for roughly $3,900 to $4,500. That works out to about $3,400 to $4,000 extra for the Porsche treatment. The Grand Prix White with Green and Tangerine with Black editions are capped at 911 units each, while the Grand Prix White with Blue is a Germany-only run of just 150. The previous collaboration suggests they might not linger: the 2024 Martini Racing edition sold out in about eight hours.

Porsche didn’t stop at the espresso machine, of course. A matching Pico grinder ($2,125) wears the same liveries, and the wider collection adds handcrafted espresso and cappuccino cups, barista towels, coasters, coffee canisters, hoodies, caps, and socks. My personal favorite is a 1:18-scale RS 2.7 model car that comes with its own miniature coffee machine, which is adorably unhinged. The collection is offered through the Porsche Online Shop, select Porsche Centers, and select Porsche Design Stores. The original ducktail kept the RS planted at over 150 mph; this one has the less demanding job of keeping your cups from sliding off.

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EVOLIA’s Sculptural Bracelet Tracks Wellness Without a Screen

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A health tracker shouldn’t have to look like a tiny phone strapped to your arm. I like the idea of learning more about my body without adding another glowing rectangle to the day, and EVOLIA’s Founders Edition is built around that preference. Designed by EVOLIA in Valenza, Italy, the screenless biometric bracelet aims to make wellness tracking feel like wearing jewelry, with information waiting in an app rather than demanding attention on your wrist.

The design makes that ambition easy to understand. In the company’s product images, rounded metal links build toward a wider, sculptural center, with a dark circular detail interrupting the polished surface. The Rose Chrome version looks almost liquid where the light catches its edges. I’d happily see more wearable technology take this kind of aesthetic risk. It has a recognizable shape of its own, rather than looking like a familiar smartwatch with the display painted over. It’s jewelry you would notice.

Designer: EVOLIA®

EVOLIA specifies 904L stainless steel for the upper case and bracelet, with zirconia ceramic and sapphire crystal on the back. Matte Black, Chrome, and Rose Chrome give the same form quite different personalities. More practically, the company says its screwless bracelet allows links to be adjusted and removed without tools. That’s an appealing detail because the ownership experience includes getting the thing to fit, not simply admiring it in a box. Hidden mechanisms deserve attention when they remove an ordinary annoyance.

Underneath that jewelry treatment is a substantial list of promised tracking functions: heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, sleep, stress, and activity. The hardware includes optical sensing and on-demand ECG measurements at up to 800 Hz. EVOLIA uses the phrase “research-grade,” but I wouldn’t treat that label alone as proof of better everyday accuracy. The company also states that the device is intended for general wellness and information, not medical diagnosis. That distinction matters more than an impressive-sounding specification.

The “AI” portion lives in the interpretation. EVOLIA says its companion app turns biometric data into AI-assisted personal insights, with support for iOS, Android, Apple Health, and Google Health Connect. For me, the useful test would be how clearly it explains a pattern and how carefully it handles uncertainty. A beautifully presented score isn’t automatically helpful. I’d rather get a comprehensible account of a trend than a confident verdict that leaves me wondering what I’m supposed to do next.

Screenless also doesn’t mean completely silent. The bracelet can use light signals and haptic feedback for notifications, which EVOLIA says can be switched off. I appreciate that choice more than a blanket promise of distraction-free living. Some people will want an incoming-call nudge; others will want the bracelet to leave them alone. Putting the detailed information on a phone creates a deliberate moment to check it, although the app still has to earn the attention it receives.

The physical specifications introduce a few practical questions. At 15.3 millimeters thick, the central body deserves a close look before anyone assumes this will disappear under a shirt cuff. EVOLIA claims up to three days of battery life and roughly an hour for a full charge. That means charging remains a regular appointment. I’d want to know how the complete metal bracelet feels overnight, too, since sleep tracking asks an object to stay on when most jewelry comes off.

The Founders Edition is currently a preorder, limited to 1,000 numbered pieces. The listed price is $1,899, with a $99 reservation deposit, and dispatch is estimated to begin in late November 2026. That puts considerable pressure on both halves of the proposition. At this price, I’d want jewelry I genuinely wanted to wear and an app that explained itself well. The sculptural bracelet gets my attention; whether its information deserves a place in the daily routine is the more consequential test.

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