Put "Her" into a card.

Author: Pumping Geek

This year, the foundational capabilities of large models have once again made a leap, with AI tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Doubao becoming common assistants for more and more professionals in the workplace.

The capabilities of these AIs are indeed powerful, but there is a considerable threshold: to make them "work," it often requires preparing a large amount of data in advance. In other words, today's AI is more like a highly intelligent consultant, while from the perspective of practical efficiency improvement, what we actually need is an "intelligent assistant" that is always by our side, helping me record information and providing reminders and feedback at critical moments.

Xiaoice is trying to fill this gap. In April, the company publicly launched its first global Agentic AI hardware product, TicNote. On June 25, this hardware was officially released in the domestic market. At the launch event, Xiaoice founder Li Zhifei emphasized that this is not just a voice recorder, translator, or voice assistant, but a "portable AI thinking partner."

Before asking about it, some companies at home and abroad have attempted to combine large models with recording hardware, but most of them still regard AI as an audio information processing tool, mainly using it to organize meeting minutes or translations. Although TicNote has similar capabilities, its positioning goes beyond that. By continuously recording users' work and life information, TicNote has effectively become a "super assistant" that accompanies users 24/7, proactively providing work inspiration and insights based on daily communication content and the reasoning capabilities of large models.

As an "old friend" of Geek Park, we have witnessed the complete journey of Outward Q&A from startup to IPO, and have experienced its strategic contraction in the direction of large models. Now, Outward Q&A has chosen to re-enter the large model track in a hardware way. This is not simply following a trend or imitating others, but rather the result of founder Li Zhifei's years of accumulation in the field of human-computer voice interaction—while seeing existing paths being validated, he also sees deeper possibilities and hopes to create better products in this direction.

01

A portable "AI assistant"

The appearance of TicNote is similar to a compact magnetic charging treasure, with a thickness of about 3 millimeters, and it can be attached to the back of the phone throughout the day via magnetic suction, hardly affecting daily use.

TicNote | From: Wandering Q&A

Unlike traditional voice recorders, TicNote's card-style design is aimed at "all-day recording" usage scenarios from the very beginning. Users can easily control the recording operation modes.

This hardware form is not a creation of Mobvoi; earlier products like Plaud Note also adopted a similar design. Its advantage lies in its ability to run stably for long periods in scenarios that require a large amount of voice recording, such as education, media, and creative planning, and to enhance the efficiency of post-processing tasks like transcription, translation, and summarization by leveraging large model capabilities.

This application scenario has gained a certain degree of market validation, but Mobvoi believes that the combination of card-style recording hardware and large models, in addition to recording and processing functionalities, also contains greater potential.

In addition to basic functions such as transcription and summarization, TicNote's biggest feature is its built-in AI Agent "Shadow AI." It supports real-time conversation, logical reasoning, knowledge integration, and writing suggestions, allowing for a deeper understanding of the user's content creation needs. Whether in work, study, or the process of exploring inspiration, it can maintain a dialogue with the user, assist in completing tasks, and become a personal intelligent assistant.

Yolanda is one of the beta users of TicNote. As a tech executive and mother of a child preparing for the high school entrance examination, she often faces the challenges of fragmented time and information overload, making it difficult to balance family and work. TicNote has largely alleviated this predicament for her.

A scheduling conflict arose between an online parent meeting and an important company review meeting, making it impossible for Yolanda to manage both at the same time. Therefore, she "invisibly" recorded the entire content of the parent meeting using TicNote, and afterwards, she accurately transcribed and automatically extracted the key points, organizing them into a clear structured written summary and mind map, allowing her to grasp the meeting information comprehensively without needing to re-listen.

In addition, Yolanda also had the children bring TicNote to each tutoring session. By the end of the semester, TicNote not only recorded the key points from the teacher but also helped summarize the child's areas of weakness in knowledge. As the high school entrance exam approached, the child used TicNote to organize the "on-site toolkit" and "emergency methods" taught by the teacher, and combined with the weaknesses to form clear review materials.

From Yolanda's experience, it can be seen that TicNote is not just a portable recording tool, but is gradually evolving into a truly "understanding you" intelligent assistant through the integrated design of hardware and software along with large model capabilities. Behind such a product is the decade-long dedication of Out of the Door Asking in the fields of voice technology and human-computer interaction.

02

A company that has been committed to human-computer interaction for ten years.

The launch of TicNote by Mobvoi is no coincidence. The "hardware-software integration + AI services" path represented by this product is actually a natural result of Mobvoi's ten years of technological accumulation and product exploration.

Since its establishment in 2012, Out of the Door has made human-machine voice interaction its core direction and is one of the earliest companies in China to practice the "voice-first" concept. The early self-developed voice assistant app focused on Chinese voice recognition and natural language understanding. In the following years, the company continuously tried to embed voice capabilities into hardware, successively launching products such as the smart watch TicWatch, smart rearview mirror TicMirror, and translator TicTranslator, and continuously exploring the application possibilities of integrating voice with devices.

These products were at the forefront of the industry at the time and accumulated considerable technical experience, but challenges such as the usage threshold and cost of voice interaction have always limited it from becoming a mainstream operation method. Users need to communicate with devices through wake words and command languages, resulting in high interaction costs and low fault tolerance, making it difficult to undertake complex tasks. Therefore, Outgoing Q&A reduced its hardware product line for a period and shifted its focus to refining AI capabilities.

However, on the evolutionary path of human-computer interaction, Out of the Door has never truly given up. The arrival of the era of large models has brought new opportunities for human-computer voice interaction. With the improvement of model understanding and generation capabilities, human-computer dialogue has become more natural, and more and more users have begun to get used to communicating with AI in a conversational manner. Voice, as the interaction method closest to human expression habits, has thus regained its value and is expected to become an important gateway connecting AI and the real world.

TicNote was launched against this backdrop. It is not just an intelligent device for recording, but also, through the built-in AI Agent "Shadow AI", continuously organizes the content that users hear and speak every day into structured information, building a "personal knowledge base" unique to each individual. Based on this personalized knowledge base, the large model can not only be efficiently accessed but also connect to the internet to explore the value of information at a higher dimension.

This product form is an integrated embodiment of the multi-dimensional technological accumulation of voice recognition, natural language understanding, and terminal design by Outriders. Taking the "Flash Chat" feature of TicNote as an example, users can initiate voice conversations at any time during the recording process, quickly review previous content, and extract key information, making it suitable for interviews, meetings, and other scenarios requiring immediate feedback. This "record and ask" interaction mode is precisely the result of Outriders' continuous efforts in voice technology over the past decade.

At the same time, TicNote also has automated project management capabilities. In the past, even AI recording pens were often limited to single scenarios, processing a segment of content once the recording was finished. However, in the interactive logic of TicNote, all recording data is unified into a sustainable and expandable knowledge base, allowing users to call, organize, and continue conversations across different scenarios and times at any time. This more intuitive information organization method not only allows TicNote to serve professional users but also gives it broad applicability for everyday use.

More importantly, this time, the company is no longer trying to "control a machine" with voice, but rather leveraging the capabilities of large models to make voice an entry point for building knowledge and a助力 for promoting thinking.

Looking back, TicNote is not just a turn in technological direction, but rather a completion—it gathers every step taken by Outward Q&A over the past decade, concentrating the experiences scattered across multiple levels such as human-computer interaction, hardware design, and AI services into a product that is more suitable for this era.

03

In the future, everyone will need a "high-dimensional memory warehouse".

Currently, ADHD has become a hot social topic. "Difficulty concentrating" as a symptom is becoming increasingly popular. Besides actual ADHD patients, more and more ordinary people are starting to notice similar symptoms in themselves, even beginning to "self-diagnose."

This has a lot to do with the huge information overload we are experiencing. Looking back, humanity has never had to receive and process as much information every day as we do today. This information flows into our eyes not only through our phones but also exists in every scene of our lives. We receive too much information every day, yet the shelf life of our thoughts is becoming shorter and shorter.

A common perception in the past was that, compared to physical labor, mental labor was easy, and sitting in an office was a "privilege" for a few, a common aspiration for people. However, now, more and more people are engaged in work revolving around information, yet they feel exhausted and even weary of it.

We are increasingly aware that processing information is also a burden that can lead to "strain." In the present, we need to reduce the load on our brains just like we use mechanical tools to replace physical labor. Such devices must possess perception, interaction, and the ability to assist in thinking and insight, becoming our "pre-sensory" and "auxiliary brain."

This may be the ultimate ambition of TicNote and Out of the Door.

Today, the vast majority of AI products provide users with information from a "single scene perspective." In reality, the ultimate future of AI should be able to assist users in managing their entire memory and thinking, which includes not only information and knowledge but also recollections. Currently, the AI industry has proposed the concept of "life stream." The recorded life stream is essentially our "memory warehouse." What Agentic AI can do is elevate this memory warehouse, uncovering thoughts and insights that we are often not aware of, ultimately helping us lighten the burden of receiving information and inspire more creativity.

In the foreseeable future, each of us will need an agent with perfect memory and the ability to assist us in thinking, helping to reorganize the information we receive and increasing the dimensions of our thoughts. The "Eureka Moment" feature built into TicNote has already given us a glimpse of this future. It can provide users with AI perspective "insights" based on the data saved by the user.

Most AI assistant products today are trained on publicly available data in a general sense, largely aiming for an "all-knowing and all-powerful" training and development goal. However, what more users actually need is a kind of "personalized AI". This Agentic AI should understand our private knowledge more and provide information that is relevant to us, helping us build a personalized experience.

For Dui Chumen Wenwen and Li Zhifei, TicNote is not only a successful realization of technical ideals they have adhered to for the past twelve years, but also a new departure towards the future of AIGC. They have arrived at a new era of human-computer interaction, the new era of AIGC. TicNote is by no means a "speculation" in product terms, but rather a long-term technical "love brain" that has finally borne fruit.

In April last year, Out of the Door Technology went public, becoming the first AIGC stock in China. For Li Zhifei and his team, solving the problem of "money" has never been the most important thing; what matters more is that they can refine the technology they firmly believe in to its best state and then bring it to the world.

Now, it has taken a solid step again.