Looki L1 review: AI-powered wearable that makes daily content creation easier than ever

I’ve reviewed a lot of gadgets over the years, and as a professional tech reviewer, almost every gadget I come across these days has started to feel like something I’ve tried out previously. The novelty wears off quickly, and almost every new iteration comes with just a handful of new features at best. However, every now and then, there comes a new product that reminds me why I fell in love with tech in the first place. Looki L1 is a product that belongs to this category.

In theory, this is a simple wearable camera that lets you record your days in a convenient manner. However, the execution is what makes this wearable a game-changer in a true sense. Unlike Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, where you have to manually trigger the recording (either physically or via voice command), the Looki L1 allows you an option where you can just put it on as a locket around your neck and forget about it. The camera will record videos either at regular intervals or via AI in select moments, and create a video montage for you that feels truly wholesome. I’ve been testing Looki L1 for more than a month at this point, and here are my uninhibited thoughts about it.

Table of Contents

Compact and functional design

Let’s get the nitty-gritty out of the way first. The Looki L1 measures 1.89″x1.99″x0.66″ (Length x Width x Depth) and weighs just 32 grams. When we’re talking about a gadget that has to be worn through the day and as a locket, it needs to get certain things right:

  1. It cannot be heavy or bulky.
  2. It needs to be easy to wear and offer wearing versatility (depending on your clothing).
  3. It cannot look tacky or suspicious.
  4. It needs to have some sort of protection (against hard bumps or occasional drops).
  5. It should have intuitive controls.

Looki L1 doesn’t just ensure that all of these bases are covered, but excels in these departments. First, it is compact and lightweight (due to a plastic build). It comes with magnetic pogo pins at the back that allow it to be used with a string accessory that connects it at the back and turns it into a locket.

I wore the camera through the day on most days and forgot about it after wearing it in the morning. The lightweight design is quite encouraging, and the convenience ensures that you end up wearing the L1 without much resistance.

As far as wearing versatility is concerned, the magnetic pins allow you to attach the neck string with the L1 even when you have the gadget over your shirt and the string below it.

Coming to the third point. Wearing a camera around your neck can feel like an albatross if it looks like a spy camera or something intrusive. This is where the Jigglypuff-like design of the Looki L1 comes into play. Especially as a locket, the camera looks and feels harmless to an extent where everyone around you forgets about it right away or does not even notice it (although I do recommend you do declare to everyone that you have a recording camera on you).

Notably, the companion app for L1 allows you the option to completely switch off all light indicators while recording, which creates obvious privacy concerns. Having said that, I would say that the recording lights often end up altering people’s natural reactions, as it often happens with some other wearables that offer recording functionality. If you do want to capture someone’s natural reactions, this feature is a must. Also, this is not a spy camera by any means, it is clearly visible when worn around your neck, so I’ll give the brand a pass for this one.

Next up, let’s talk about protection. You can buy a protective case for the camera that provides sufficient protection on a daily basis. Thankfully, it doesn’t add much weight to the camera either.

Finally, there are two physical buttons on the Looki L1 and finger-swipe recognition. While the top button can be used to start/stop video recording, holding down the lower button switches on the ‘Story/AI mode’. Just a single press of the lower button also lets you take pictures. As there are just two buttons, it took me almost no time to get used to the device’s functionality.

App and features – AI unlocks true potential

If you just consider its basic functionalities, Looki L1, as a product, could have existed in some shape or form long time back. Maybe the camera quality would have been inferior, the battery life could have been shorter, and maybe its size would have been larger, but it could have been possible. However, what elevates this from an average product to a genuinely useful gadget is the use of AI.

Before jumping into the AI aspect, let’s go over the fundamental aspects of the gadget and the app. Once you’ve set up the Looki L1 app and paired it with your device using Bluetooth 5.0, you can choose either ‘Story’ or ‘AI’ mode. In ‘Story’ mode, you manually choose the duration of the clips recorded by the device and the time interval after which it starts recording each time. Following are the intervals and durations you can choose:

Now this is the fundamental use case of the product and works well as the videos recorded on the device are first stored locally (32GB built-in storage) and then transferred to cloud storage (up to 1TB) and deleted from local storage 12 hours later.

However, what AI enables is that it creates a summary of your day in both video and comic-strip formats. This takes away the pain of manually curating video footage from the day and editing. After using it for a month, I must admit that it does an amazing job of picking out the highlights from the day and an even better job of stitching together the clips to create the final highlight video, which is less than a minute long and perfect for sharing on social media. You can even choose to get this highlight video in vertical or horizontal aspect ratio (as per your requirement).

Coming to the ‘AI mode’, I found it to be a hit-and-miss. Theoretically, this mode uses AI to automatically capture interesting moments throughout the day. However, in my testing, it sometimes missed some crucial moments and captured some random, mundane moments instead. While this mode has a lot of scope and it can be drastically improved with software updates, in its current state, I would opt to use the reliable Story mode on a consistent basis instead.

The smart wearable comes with support for an AI assistant, with which you communicate via its 1W speaker (audio boosted by a smart amplifier). In order to access the AI assistant (Ask Looki), you can simply press the device from the front and hold for a couple of seconds. In my limited testing of the device, the L1 managed to get most answers right.

The Looki L1 also has some neat tricks up its sleeves. For example, it can help you with nutritional tracking without manual logging. In the company’s own words – “By using multimodal AI, the L1 ‘sees’ your meals and can provide nutritional estimates and food identification in your daily summary, eliminating the need to type out everything you eat.”

Similarly, the L1 provides real-time feedback during a workout when in Fitness Mode. The device uses its 109-degree FoV and motion-tracking AI to monitor your form and rhythm to provide proactive haptic or voice cues to help you achieve your fitness goals.

However, I found it to be a bit unintuitive to use this voice assistant as my phone is already capable of doing these things (and that too silently!). In a crowd, I wouldn’t prefer a device on my neck to shout out answers at me, but someone who is not carrying a phone and still in need of accessing a digital assistant for answers will find this to be a useful inclusion.

One of the most useful AI features that I found to be truly amazing was Vlog Agent, which allowed me to make AI edits from the video dump that I had on the device. Apart from the daily summary, in case I wanted a video that only focused on the parts where I was having food, family time, or just driving, I could make a vlog from only those moments with just a tap of a button. All I needed to do in this process was confirm the selection of videos. This quality-of-life feature itself is reason enough for me to recommend this to anyone who wants to get into the world of content creation.

There is a feature called Looki PIE within the app, which constantly gives you recommendations for a particular day. For example, cutting down your screen time before going to bed, weather updates, dimming down your dashboard screen, and so on.

Looki L1 comes with support for dual-band 2.4GHz / 5GHz Wi-Fi, which is not the latest, but gets the job done.

Camera quality and battery life – exceeds expectations on both fronts

As we’re talking about a wearable camera with size and an appealing price tag, I was sceptical regarding the camera quality and battery life offered by the Looki L1. I also factored in that this is a first-generation product. However, I was surprised when I started testing the product. The 1080p (30fps) videos recorded by the camera with a 109-degree field-of-view, and the 4K pictures clicked by it, even in less-than-ideal lighting, turned out to be pretty impressive. Not just that, even the stabilisation on offer was much better than what I expected. Even while on the move, the L1 recorded videos effortlessly.

With 3 microphones and noise reduction, the videos captured by the camera were of good quality, both in terms of visuals and audio.

One thing that you need to keep in mind is that the videos recorded by the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Looki L1 would be different in terms of perspective. While the Meta glasses sit at your eye-level, the L1 is most likely placed around the top portion of your chest area. You can certainly adjust the neck string to a higher position (which I personally preferred), but if you want to record something you are doing with your hands, a slightly lower position is even better than what the Meta glasses would manage.

Powered by a 4nm Qualcomm chipset, the Looki L1 has been claimed to offer a battery life of around 12 hours. If you change the duration of clips recorded or the interval after which clips are recorded, it can vary anywhere from 6 hours to 12 hours.

Unlike other gadgets, the battery life of this product is easy to test as usage doesn’t vary a lot from one user to another. So it is hardly surprising that the claimed figures are, in fact, quite accurate.

Verdict

Usually, I do not give away my thoughts about a gadget early on in the review but Looki L1 turned out to be an exception. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a perfect device by any means. Its ‘AI mode’ needs improvement, its battery life could be better so that you don’t have to charge it during the day, and camera quality can also be improved. However, despite these complaints, there is no denying the fact that this ambitious product is currently the best gadget for creating your daily journal.

Personally, as someone who has a young kid growing up at home, journaling days via this gadget felt wholesome, and I’ll definitely cherish several videos recorded by the L1 that I definitely wouldn’t have captured using my phone.

While this product would be ideal for content creators, for recording footage in the most convenient manner, I’d say that this product is perfect for anyone who wants to capture their average daily day routine for their journaling needs. Although AI still has some way to go before it can match manual editing, for those of you who dread the idea of video editing, this can be your most convenient entry to the world of vlogs.

Priced at $249, the Looki L1 is currently not available in India, but this is one product you must ask your friends and family to bring along when they come from one of the countries where the brand is currently shipping. I’m telling you, this one’s worth it.

Editor’s Rating: 8.5 / 10

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