AI at your Fingertips: Wearable Ring as a Low-Friction Interface for Agentic AI
- Minghui Zhao ,
- Judith Amores ,
- Vaishnavi Ranganathan ,
- Xiaofan Jiang ,
- Bodhi Priyantha
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026) |
While “Agentic AI” can now execute complex, multi-step workflows, human interaction with these agents remains tethered to high-friction screens. We present a technology probe designed to explore the experience of screenless, “fire-and-forget” task delegation. Our system consists of a custom-built wearable ring with touch input and haptic feedback, paired with an agentic pipeline that autonomously recovers from failures to ensure robust execution. Through an exploratory user study (N=11) involving real-world scenarios, we identify design tensions in screenless interaction. Our findings reveal a conflict between delegation and verification: participants valued the efficiency of screenless interaction for simple tasks but lacked the confidence to delegate complex workflows without audio/visual feedback. We further highlight the social tension of public voice input, where users prefer whispering to maintain privacy and social acceptability. This work contributes a functional prototype and initial design implications for the future of always-available AI agents that minimize visual attention.