Why We Built Nexting — And Why It's Open Source

In January 2025, I quit my job as an embedded engineer at DJI to build something I couldn't stop thinking about: an AI wearable that's actually open. Not “open” as a marketing word. Open as in: you can read the firmware, swap the AI model, write your own plugins, and fix what's broken.

The Problem with AI Wearables Today

I've tried every AI wearable that shipped in 2024. The Humane AI Pin. The Rabbit R1. The Meta Ray-Ban. They all share the same pattern: impressive demo, disappointing daily use, and zero ability to extend or fix them yourself.

The Humane AI Pin costs $699 plus a $24/month subscription and can't reliably send a text message. The Rabbit R1 promised a universal AI agent and delivered a chatbot with a scroll wheel. They failed not because the AI was bad — frontier models are genuinely capable now — but because the product design was wrong.

These devices tried to replace your phone. That's the wrong framing. Nobody wants to replace their phone. People want something that handles the moments when pulling out your phone is awkward, slow, or rude — walking, cooking, driving, in conversation.

What Nexting Actually Is

Nexting is a clip-on AI voice device. You clip it to your collar, bag strap, or pocket. You talk to it, it talks back. No screen, no projector, no camera. Just a microphone, a speaker, and a button.

It records what you say, sends the audio to a frontier AI model (Claude, GPT-4o, or whatever you configure), and speaks the response back to you. The whole loop takes under two seconds. It feels like talking to someone who actually knows things.

The hardware is deliberately minimal. An nRF52840 microcontroller (the same chip in AirTags), a PDM microphone, a tiny speaker, and a rechargeable battery. No GPS, no cellular modem, no display. Every component that doesn't directly serve the voice interaction was removed.

Why Open Source

There's a practical reason and a philosophical reason.

The practical reason: closed AI wearables die when the company dies. Humane is already struggling. If they shut down, every AI Pin becomes e-waste. With Nexting, the firmware is on GitHub. The plugin protocol (OpenClaw) is an open standard. Even if Nexting Inc. disappears tomorrow, your device still works — you just point it at your own server.

The philosophical reason: AI hardware is too important to be controlled by one company. These devices listen to your conversations. They process your most private thoughts. You should be able to verify exactly what they do with that data. Open source isn't just a feature — it's a trust guarantee.

The OpenClaw Plugin System

The single biggest design decision in Nexting was making it extensible. We built OpenClaw, an open plugin protocol that lets anyone add capabilities to the device.

Want Nexting to control your Philips Hue lights? There's a plugin for that. Want it to query your company's internal knowledge base? Write a plugin in 50 lines of TypeScript. Want it to speak Mandarin? Configure a different TTS provider.

This is the iPhone App Store moment for AI wearables. Instead of waiting for us to build every integration, anyone can build one. The device gets better every week, not every quarter.

Two Ways to Run It

Nexting has two modes, and this is important:

What's Next

We're shipping the first batch of Nexting devices now. The firmware is stable, the cloud service is live, and the plugin ecosystem is growing.

What excites me most isn't the device itself — it's what people will build with it. An open AI wearable is a new platform. We built the clip. The community will build everything else.

If you want to be part of it, reserve yours today.