At IFA 2026 in Germany, a company called Lingverse showed off an AI gadget that can sit on a desk as a small robot one moment and hang around your neck as a pendant the next. The device, named iKairos, is built to track a person's daily activities, preferences and experiences, and then use that pattern to offer suggestions later on.
One round core, two very different shells
At the heart of iKairos sits a round module the company calls the AI Core, essentially the brain of the whole system, which can be slotted into different physical shells depending on how someone wants to use it. On the IFA 2026 show floor, that core was shown fitted inside a compact desktop robot capable of observing its surroundings from a desk. Whenever the user steps away, the same core can be pulled out and worn around the neck as a pendant, letting the device stay with them well beyond the desk. Because of that, information keeps getting collected across the whole day, whether someone is at home or out and about.
LifeOS tries to learn your habits
Running underneath all of this is software called LifeOS, which links together information gathered at different times to build an understanding of a user's habits, relationships, preferences and experiences. Lingverse offered one example to explain how this plays out: if a user keeps bringing up sailing in conversation but never actually goes to learn it, the system can later suggest a beginner sailing lesson on its own. In a similar way, if someone reacts positively to a piece of artwork or some other object on a given day, iKairos stores that visual moment and can surface it again for the user at a more relevant time.
The same core could power home robots later
According to Lingverse, the AI Core is not meant to be limited to just the robot and the pendant. The company says it plans to make the core compatible with other hardware down the line, including home robots. That would mean the history built up on one device could carry over to a new one, letting it immediately understand a user's habits and preferences instead of starting from scratch every time a new gadget enters the picture.
A physical shutter, a mute button and control over your data
Given how much personal information a device like this collects, Lingverse has built in a few privacy safeguards. iKairos comes with a physical camera shutter, a dedicated privacy indicator light and a manual mute button, so a user can directly shut off the camera or the microphone whenever needed. Voice detection and capture are processed entirely on the device itself rather than on an outside server, and users get to decide whether their data is sent off for cloud processing at all.
Lingverse says data is encrypted both while it's being transferred and while it's stored, and that none of it will be used to train the company's own AI models. Users can also choose how long their raw data stays saved, and can delete individual records or wipe their entire account's data whenever they want.
No price or release date yet
For now, iKairos is only being shown off at IFA 2026. Lingverse has not yet said when the device will go on sale or how much it will cost.
