Earlier in April, the startup Era held a gathering of artists who had received its developer kit in New York. The artists showed off the various mini gadgets they had built, like a souvenir that tells you facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that looks at your stocks and tells if today is the day you can quit your job, or a gadget that tells you about air quality.
While all these devices are experimental, the common thread is Era’s platform, which allows hardware makers to create AI agents and orchestrations for AI devices. The company doesn’t want to create devices itself, but aims to enable others to do so by providing a software layer that could handle tasks like customized voice creation or adding intelligence to a classic device, such as headphones.