zacharytamas

First impressions of the Limitless Pendant

The Pendant itself’s battery life seems decent for its size. However it puts a very noticeable strain on the paired iPhone’s battery. My phone is not comfortably making it through a day anymore and looking at the Battery pane of the Settings app shows me that ~30% of my battery usage is Limitless in the background.

Syncing is finicky but likely due to some rate limiting and me being impatient while trying it out. Sometimes it seems like it’s almost realtime, other times even if you manually force a sync some bit of conversation won’t show up for 30+ minutes.

Transcription is either really good or really bad: there doesn’t seem to be anything in the middle.

Any interactions with my young children whose English and pronunciation is not perfect usually result in completely nonsense transcriptions and very little insight.

I’m sure it’s just recording quality but transcription quality really seems to tank if you are not absolutely still while the speech is happening. I’m not sure if the Pendant has multiple microphones for noise cancellation like similar AI wearables. It could also be doppler effect.

The speaker recognition feature is pretty weak at this moment. I provided samples of my voice and it commonly misattributes me with people who have very different voices from mine. This happens both ways: it commonly tags my wife as me or it will tag us as both the same speaker (“Speaker 1”) and it is a mess to clean up later.

The UI lets you change the name tag on a segment of text but it is extremely laborious to do if you need to change more than just one. They do provide a “Change All” feature which will change the name of the speaker to something else for all instances around one but in the cases like above, where my wife and I will be the “same” speaker, doing this will change all of them and I’ll have to go back and individually tag them anyway.

The Ask AI LLM feature has been pretty useful already, though it’s of course only as good as the transcripts which can be terrible at times. At times it seems the Ask AI feature can answer things that are not mentioned in my Lifelog so it seems that it has access to more raw data. This is definitely the best part of Limitless, of course, because it is their primary value proposal.

After using it for several days I do think it's worth the effort of using it but so far it is falling short of what I think it could be for me personally. I can't have it turned on much during my family life because it just burns through minutes generating senseless transcripts and thus undermining its usefulness for a major part of my life.

3/1/2025