Summary
I go through a fair few gadgets every year, but very few of them make it to my everyday carry. Even fewer of them have AI features baked in. So when the Looki L1 came across my desk, I was skeptical. A few weeks of skeptical testing later, it’s one of my favorite gadgets of the year.
A small wearable camera that turns your day into a searchable memory bank (among other media types) seems a real-world reimagination of the privacy nightmare Microsoft’s Recall feature was. I’ve used it at family dinners, on hikes, during bike trips, and long work sessions, and every single time, it captures little moments I would have completely forgotten. And that’s exactly why it also scares me a little.
The hardware feels almost magical
Why the Looki L1 impressed me immediately
The Looki L1 doesn’t try to be an action camera or a smartphone replacement. Instead, it runs what Looki calls a Proactive Intelligence Engine, snapping short five- to 15-second clips every one to five minutes throughout the day, then using AI to stick the good parts into daily vlogs, journal entries, and even comic-book style summaries you can flip through later.
The device weighs only 32 grams, so you barely feel it around your neck or clipped onto your shirt. The magnetic clip (which also doubles up as a wireless charger) holds it snugly enough for me to be confident when I’m out riding my bike with the L1 clipped to my chest.
You can also just hold the touchpad on the front of the device and ask it questions in natural language about your day, like what you ate, or where you kept a particular item, and it’ll pull the answer from that day’s footage. On paper, that’s basically a second brain, and in practice, it mostly delivers. The 12 MP camera isn’t the greatest, the three noise-cancelling mics work reasonably well, IP67 water resistance is nice to have, and roughly nine to 13 hours of battery life is decent for what it does.
Looki L1
- Brand
- Looki
- Connectivity
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
- Battery
- 375mAh
- Weight
- 32 grams Looki L1 is a lightweight AI-powered wearable camera that passively captures moments throughout your day, then uses multimodal AI to organize them into searchable memories, summaries, and highlight reels.
- Price
- $249 The privacy questions are hard to ignore Constant vision comes with real trade-offs The Looki L1 is great, but what makes it so great is the fact that it’s listening and watching almost constantly. Everything is stored on the device’s onboard memory by default, but it’s of no use to you there. To get any utility out of it, you’ll have to upload your content to the cloud, and once you sync, your video, audio, and images head off to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, where third-party AI models from OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude actually process them to generate those comics, vlogs, and summaries you see. That means your raw footage gets decrypted and read server-side, which sort of undercuts Looki’s promise of end-to-end encryption. Actual end-to-end encryption means your data is only visible to you and the recipient you’re sending it to. But in this case, the recipient is an AI model. If a cloud AI has to go through footage from my daily life to summarize it, the promise of encryption is broken by definition. Looki also hasn’t published a named encryption standard, doesn’t hold a SOC2 or ISO 27001 certification, and there’s no independent security audit of the L1 anywhere. The company claims your data is secure and that it isn’t used to train any AI models, and as far as my research goes, it’s true. But at the end of the day, you’re trusting their word, not a third-party-checked system. Additionally, since the device is a camera worn in public, it’s also recording bystanders who never agreed to any of this — a much bigger ethical wrinkle than most people realize. The blinking recording light and voice prompts help indicate the status of the device, but it’s not consent, and it can be turned off in the companion app, so it doesn’t really stop a stranger in frame ending up in your cloud-processed comic book strip they never asked to be a part of. Running everything locally changes the equation More control, fewer features You can dodge most of your privacy concerns by keeping the L1 in local-only mode and disabling cloud uploads (which are thankfully disabled by default). Footage stays on the onboard 32GB storage for up to five days before you decide whether to upload anything, and if you never sync, nothing touches the cloud, similar to how some people are pulling their photo library off Google’s servers and doing the processing on their own hardware instead. That said, the available storage might be much smaller. My unit only showed about 25GB of usable space after the latest update. But the moment you do that, the device loses most of what makes it special. The AI-generated comics, the daily recaps, the searchable queries, all of that lean on cloud processing. Local-only mode basically turns the gadget into an expensive point-and-shoot camera with really good battery life. It’s the right instinct architecturally, and I have to give Looki credit for not forcing me to send everything to the cloud the moment I pair the device to the app. Local-first storage is always better than always-on cloud listeners some competitors use, but it also means the privacy-safe version of this device is the least interesting version of it. I still haven’t made up my mind Brilliant technology with uncomfortable implications For now, I keep wearing the L1 wherever I can, which is mostly when I’m stepping out to run errands, out on trips, or when I’m working out of a cafe. The convenience of not having to pull out my phone, of having my day quietly documented and turned into something I can just query, is sort of addictive. But I also can’t shake the fact that Looki’s corporate structure is a little opaque, with a Toronto registration, a Shenzhen-based R&D arm, and Ant Group as its lead investor, the kind of setup that invites the same data-transfer scrutiny other hardware makers with quiet ties to Chinese servers have faced. There’s no known breach yet, and Looki says it won’t train AI models on your content or sell your data, a promise worth holding it to given how many companies quietly use your uploads to do exactly that. But no known breach and no independent audit aren’t the same as safe. if you’re buying one, use AI Mode selectively, keep it off in sensitive spaces, and actually tell people around you it’s recording. That’s the deal I’ve made with myself, and honestly, it’s an uneasy one, no matter how much I enjoy the convenience the L1 brings.