{"id":378547,"date":"2026-04-02T16:56:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T16:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/378547\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T16:56:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T16:56:23","slug":"this-400-not-ai-keychain-is-pointless-extravagant-and-weirdly-lovable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/378547\/","title":{"rendered":"This $400 (Not) AI Keychain Is Pointless, Extravagant, and Weirdly Lovable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gadgets venture to do a lot nowadays. They want to revolutionize the way you work<\/a>, or sleep<\/a>, or unwind, or how much data you can get from your pee<\/a>\u2014almost all of them endeavor to change your life in some way, shape, or form for the better. That\u2019s the hook, anyway; whether or not they actually do any of those things successfully is another can of overcomplicated worms. But what if gadgets did something much bolder\u2014much more subversive, even? What if they did\u2026 nothing at all?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s pretty much the whole concept of Starboy<\/a>, a Tamagotchi-like keychain that costs anywhere between $200 and $440 at the highest end. It\u2019s a pet (kind of), and a piece of jewelry (kind of), and uses AI (kind of), but as one of Starboy\u2019s creators, Daniel Kuntz<\/a>, puts it, the star-shaped toy promises \u201cnot to change your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

And based on my experience interacting with Starboy, that\u2019s exactly the kind of underachievement that Starboy excels at. Mostly, Starboy feels like a tech-ish accessory. It\u2019s got an OLED display that shows a cartoonishly emotive face, which Kuntz tells me was designed by someone who used to animate for Disney. It\u2019s got a camera so it can see what you\u2019re doing, too. With this combo of screen, camera, and some other sensors, you\u2019re able to engage with Starboy.<\/p>\n

\"Starboy\u00a9 James Pero \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

When I flip Starboy<\/a> off, it gets angry. When I shake its silly ass around, it gets dizzy. Thanks to a temperature sensor, when I throw Starboy in the freezer, it gets cold and shivers. It\u2019s frivolous stuff mostly, though you can do some useful stuff like giving it a thumbs up to check on the keychain\u2019s battery life. This gesture sends a bar rising across the screen that shows you the level. If it rises all the way, you\u2019re full; if it rises halfway, you\u2019re at half capacity. It\u2019s one of the only practical features I witnessed in my 30-minute demo with the toy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no app and it doesn\u2019t connect to your phone <\/p>\n

Mostly, Starboy is defined not by what it does but by what it doesn\u2019t do. It does not, for instance, connect to your phone. This, Kuntz tells me, is another pointed choice\u2014maybe even a dogmatic one. At the mere suggestion of introducing an app down the line to expand Starboy\u2019s functionality, Kuntz is quick to shut the idea down.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s never going to connect to your phone,\u201d he tells Gizmodo. \u201cAnd that\u2019s like a spiritual, aesthetic decision, not a pragmatic decision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Kuntz admits an app could make Starboy a \u201cbetter product\u201d by connecting to your phone, he paints the idea of relying on our glass slabs as a slippery slope. Where does the endeavor stop? You could add even more sensors and add complexity, but the price goes up, and so does the headache, both for Kuntz\u2019s team, but maybe even for the people using Starboy. If you start introducing apps, then maybe there\u2019s pressure to start including subscriptions, for example\u2014another thing that Kuntz is staunchly opposed to.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t call it an AI gadget <\/p>\n

And don\u2019t even get started on AI. The team intentionally does not include \u201cAI\u201d in its marketing, though Starboy does very much use it (they call it machine learning) to recognize faces and gestures.<\/p>\n

\"StarboyStar boys, plural. \u00a9 James Pero \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

Kuntz even goes as far as to describe Starboy as a kind of \u201cf*ck you\u201d to AI gadget companies like Humane, which made the now-defunct Ai Pin<\/a>\u2014a $700 wearable that was meant to partially (depending on which stage of Humane\u2019s marketing you\u2019re referencing as canon) replace your phone. Long story short, the Ai Pin didn\u2019t exactly take off the way founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno had hoped. Just two years after the Ai Pin\u2019s release, the gadget has been reduced to a piece of scrap metal; Humane was acquired by HP, and now Chaudhri, who now operates the remnants of the company, is tackling less flashy problems like how to get your printer to connect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Starboy, for its non-role in the troubled saga of AI gadgets, is working to avoid stories like this entirely, and so is Kuntz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe entire industry is hopelessly mimetic,\u201d he tells Gizmodo. \u201cI think everybody in Silicon Valley kind of moves in herds, and everybody copies each other. And people often need\u2014I don\u2019t know what you want to call\u2014permission. Or they need to see somebody else doing it before they want to attempt the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

On one hand, I agree. On the other hand, it\u2019s a lofty way to talk about an expensive hunk of (mostly) useless metal and circuits. In our demo, I often found myself struggling to find out what to do with Starboy. Flipping it off was fun, but the amusement was over quickly\u2014same goes for shaking Starboy around until it hates me. Maybe I\u2019m not sadistic enough, but torturing Starboy at length\u2014inanimate object or not\u2014just feels a little too Game of Thrones<\/a> for me.<\/p>\n

The Starboy team has plans to allow Starboy to communicate with other Starboys via Bluetooth, though that feature wasn\u2019t functional yet for my demo. I guess you could find joy in collecting Starboys\u2014each face is unique, and there are 5,000 variations with various associated rarities. But at a starting price of $200, I don\u2019t think many people will have the (not) AI toy budget big enough to support that habit. And even with the stuff that Starboy can\u00a0actually do, the experience that I had felt like it could use a little improvement. It often struggled to see my face or hand gestures (or maybe it struggled to process them), causing a bit of a delay in our interactions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s kind of pointless, which is the whole point <\/p>\n

It could use some fine-tuning. Then again, there\u2019s a part of me that feels like whining about Starboy not being fast or exciting enough feels like complaining that your luxurious designer dog still chases its own tail instead of playing chess with you. If that\u2019s a genuine gripe of yours, I\u2019m just not sure that you\u2019ll ever be happy with anything, let alone Starboy.<\/p>\n

\"StarboyJust chillin\u2019. \u00a9 James Pero \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

For now, Starboy is really just a lil\u2019 guy. Kuntz makes overtures to the idea of making luxury products, countering questions like \u201cWhy would someone buy this?\u201d with \u201cWhy does someone buy a 911?\u201d but even that doesn\u2019t feel quite accurate either, even if the toys come in fancy brass and stainless steel finishes. I think I know what really motivates Starboy, and it\u2019s not fashion, or AI, or even technology; it\u2019s the fact that sometimes, you can just make a tech thing, and that thing doesn\u2019t have to do much at all. That feels like a weirdly powerful message today, so, I don\u2019t know, maybe there is something deep waiting to be unlocked in Starboy\u2019s obstinacy. The question is: are you really willing to pay $440 to find out what that message is?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gadgets venture to do a lot nowadays. They want to revolutionize the way you work, or sleep, or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,5064,61,60,80,7571],"class_list":{"0":"post-378547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-hands-on","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-toys"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}