Everybody seems to want to stick AI into some oddly shaped box or another. Sometimes it's a note transcriber or a wearable pin that doesn’t quite work, or an always-listening Friend necklace that ultimately ends up being a vessel for shitposting.

Now there is a button. Chris Nolet and Ryan Burgoyne are former Apple employees who worked on developing the Apple Vision Pro. They're associated with startup accelerator Y Combinator, and the duo’s new device, available for preorder for £179 and set to ship in December, is an AI hardware puck simply called Button.

The Button does what it says on the brushed aluminum tin. It is a button, inside a case that looks (deliberately) like an iPod Shuffle. Inside is a generative AI chatbot. Press the button to enable the chatbot to listen, answer questions, and take demands. It will answer out loud or can connect to earbuds or smart glasses via Bluetooth.

The Button boys want there to be a couple of differentiators for their gadget, namely privacy and immediacy. The device only works when you push the button, so it does not listen passively to absolutely everything around it. Nolet says the focus on privacy comes from his experience meeting and talking with someone he later found out had been recording their entire conversation with a wearable device.

“It really freaked me out,” Nolet says. “It's one thing if I make a conscious decision to share something, but that’s totally a different thing. If people are just wearing around these pendants, or they're recording all of our conversations, I think it feels a little icky to me.”