We built Gem as a wearable personal agent that captures life's moments, so you can stay present and never miss a detail. Then we asked our early users how they actually use it. A few answers stopped us cold.
Why People Record
The survey shifted one of our assumptions
When you build a device that clips to your shirt and quietly records your day, you form ideas about why people want it. One of ours was that users would treasure Gem for capturing meaningful moments: a conversation with a parent, a milestone with their kids, a trip worth holding onto.
The survey pointed us somewhere else. And somewhere more interesting.
When we asked users to choose their main reasons for recording, "Save a meaningful memory" landed at the very bottom of the list. Only 2 out of 28 people selected it. Meanwhile, the top three answers were:
People are using Gem as a cognitive tool, not a memory keepsake. The distinction matters more than it sounds: they're not trying to replay the past, they're trying to function better in the present. Our users want to look someone in the eye during a hard conversation instead of scribbling notes. They want to walk out of a meeting confident they caught every action item. They want their brain back.
That "save a meaningful memory" assumption shaped a lot of our early marketing copy. But we know now that the product story is about presence and clarity, not archiving. What people actually told us is more interesting than what we thought they'd say.
Where People Use It
The doctor's office is winning
We asked users to tell us which moments in their personal life they reach for Gem. Medical or professional appointments came first, and by a wide margin: 15 of 28 people selected it.
Think about what that means. More than half users surveyed are wearing Gem to their doctor, their lawyer, their accountant. They're sitting across from someone who knows more than they do about something that matters, and they don't want to forget a word of it. They want to go home and actually understand what was said, share it with a partner, follow up correctly.
That was not a use case we emphasized when we launched. It surfaced entirely from how people are living with the product.
The walks and commutes number caught our attention too. People are capturing ideas on the move, using the audio as a scratchpad, talking through problems while their hands are occupied. A few users mentioned feeling awkward about speaking aloud in public at first, then getting over it once the habit clicked.
The People Behind the Numbers
Some stories from the survey we keep coming back to
The free-text responses gave us more than any checkbox could. A few stuck with us (for privacy reasons, we've omitted the names of respondents).
The attorney with ADHD who bought two
"I LOVE my Gems for use as a busy attorney and mom with ADHD!! In fact, I have two of them because when I thought I lost my first one, I purchased a replacement that I now use as a backup when one battery runs low, which rarely happens, surprisingly."
Gem user, early adopter
They didn't lose the first one, they actually found it. And they kept both anyway because having a backup felt safer than risking a day without it. When a user buys a second unit as insurance, you know the product found a real place in their life.
The grocery list that wrote itself
"For grocery shopping, I record ingredients from a cookbook, adjust quantities for the number of people, and add what I already have in the fridge. Then I use MemoChat to create a shopping list of only what I need to buy."
Gem user
We hadn't thought of this. Gem capturing the cookbook read-aloud, MemoChat doing the math on quantities and existing inventory, a clean shopping list ready before you leave the house. That's not a feature we shipped, it's a workflow users invented on their own.
Exporting sprint standups to email drafts
One user described recording their daily sprint standups, then exporting the transcript to Claude to have it draft email follow-ups automatically. Gem is the capture layer; the AI model downstream handles the formatting. We're building more of that kind of interoperability into the roadmap.
Church, family, meaning
One response came from someone using Gem for church services and family events, keeping recordings so they could revisit and apply what they heard to their family's life. It was a quiet reminder that "meaningful moment" means something different to every person.
After Recording
Almost nobody leaves a recording untouched
We asked what people do after they record something. The pattern was clear: people come back to their recordings. Almost everyone does.
Only 2 of 28 respondents said they hadn't revisited a recording yet. That means 26 out of 28 people have actually used what they captured, not just filed it away.
That matters to us: if recordings were sitting in a drawer, we'd have a product people acquire but don't rely on. Instead, they're returning to transcripts, following through on action items, and sending notes to people who weren't in the room.
Three in four users go straight to the summary or transcript when they revisit a recording. That's a strong signal about where the value lives: not in the audio itself, but in the processed version. We're investing accordingly in summary quality, MemoChat, and report templates.
MemoChat usage, at 5 of 28, is lower than we'd like. We think it's partly a discovery issue: users don't always realize they can just ask questions about past recordings. That's on us, but we're taking new measures to better communicate the benefits of MemoChat to our users.
What Comes Next
We want to go deeper
We included an opt-in at the end of the survey asking if users would be open to a longer conversation with us. 18 of 28 said yes. That's a high rate, and we're taking it seriously. Those conversations are being scheduled now.
If you're a Gem user and you didn't see the survey but want to share how you're using it, reach out to us directly at hello@memoket.ai. We read everything.
The overall lesson from this first round: Gem has found its way into moments we didn’t initially design for, combined with tools we didn’t anticipate, used for reasons that surprised us. That’s a great problem to have. Our job now is to build toward what users are clearly reaching for, and get out of the way of what’s already working.
Try Memoket Gem
A wearable personal agent that captures what you hear so you can stay present and act on it later.
Learn more at memoket.ai
