Put your thinking cap on literally because this new beanie types out your inner thoughts

A California tech startup is developing a beanie that’ll hook up to your brain and turn your thoughts into words on a screen. 

Tech wearables have become big business, thanks to the likes of the Apple Watch and Meta’s futuristic smart glasses. 

But Sabi is doing something a little different from what’s on the market. 

While rings, watches, and even necklaces are fairly common in the wearable space, Sabi is launching a brain-reading beanie that can basically turn the wearer into a cyborg.

The Sabi beanie uses brain-computer interface technology to read your thoughts

The Sabi hat uses brain-computer interface (or BCI) technology to work. 

If BCI sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s the same technology used by Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Shanghai-based NeuroXess. 

But whereas those companies implant BCI chips into people’s brains, Sabi’s beanie uses EEG disks that are placed onto the scalp and can record the electrical activity of your brain. 

This tech means that the beanie can ‘securely and wirelessly understand your thoughts and what you attempt to speak’, according to Sabi. 

This means that rather than having to type, you can simply think, and the words will appear on your screen.

Decoding thought words via EEG is currently limited to a few words or small commands, rather than flowing natural speech, but Sabi is hoping to build on this. 

The company told Wired that it believes the way to make it more accurate is to increase the number of EEG sensors in its hats. 

For some context, your average wearable EEG device typically has between a dozen and a few hundred sensors, but the Sabi beanie will have up to 100,000.

“Given that high-density sensing, it pinpoints exactly what and where neural activity is happening. We use that information to get much more reliable data to decode what a person is thinking,” Sabi CEO Rahul Chhabra told Wired.

It uses AI to decode your brain’s messages

Much like implanted BCI devices, the Sabi beanie uses AI technology to decode your neural activity – aka your thoughts – into real-time commands. 

For its hat, Sabi is building its large-scale AI model, which has been trained on neural data to help it learn patterns of brain activity that match with inner speech. 

you can now control things with your brain. literally.

we're building the most wearable BCI on the planet, with @sabicap, backed by @khoslaventures @accel @initialized & @kevinweil.

we collected the world’s largest neural dataset and trained the most capable Brain Foundation… pic.twitter.com/FIQiH7nIuL

— Rahul Chhabra (@rahulchhabra07) April 16, 2026

Chhabra said that so far, it has around 100,000 hours of brain data from almost 100 different volunteers. 

To begin with, the company says it’s hoping for a typing speed of around 30 words a minute, which is slower than the average human typing speed. 

But the company says the speed will increase as users spend more time wearing the BCI beanie.

Alongside a beanie, which is set to be launched by the end of this year, Sabi is also developing a baseball cap, bringing a whole new meaning to putting on your thinking cap.