The next battle in AI may have nothing to do with the models themselves.
As tech giants race to build smarter assistants, AI glasses, and autonomous agents, a Miami startup is focused on a different question: how will humans actually talk to these systems?
Ricky Rosa, founder and CEO of Oasis Devices, believes the answer won’t be a keyboard. His company is building a smart ring designed to become a new interface between people and machines, combining touch controls, voice commands, and AI into a device small enough to fit on a finger.
Rosa originally started as a nuclear engineer before switching to computer science and physics. He had been building electronics since childhood, and later, during an internship, tried Microsoft’s HoloLens. The experience convinced him that future computers would need a better way for people to control them.
“You could see that there is going to be a problem with interaction,” Rosa told Refresh Miami, noting that with AR headsets, “your arms got tired.”
That insight led to Oasis’ first product: a ring with a tiny trackpad that lets users scroll, select, and control devices with subtle finger movements.
“Voice got really good,” Rosa said.And once it did, the company’s roadmap changed.
“We are not a health ring,” Rosa asserted “This is a ring for interactions.”
The team realized a ring sits close enough to a person’s mouth to become a private voice interface. Add a microphone, and users could speak to AI tools without announcing every thought to the room.
That idea is driving Oasis’ upcoming integration with WhisperFlow, a voice-dictation platform that lets users speak into any application. Instead of pressing a button on a laptop, users can activate the ring, hold it near their mouth, and quietly dictate text or commands.
“The cool thing is that you can bring the microphone really close to your mouth, and then you can whisper,” Rosa said.
For Rosa, the feature points to a larger shift. Keyboards, mice, and touchscreens were built for computers that lived inside laptops and phones. But AI is moving into glasses, robots, smart homes, and cars.
“Computing happens in glasses. Computing happens in robots like Optimus. Computing happens in self-driving cars,” he said. “But human intent is still trapped behind screens.”
Rosa describes Oasis as an attempt to build an “operating system for intention,” where touch and voice become the main ways people express what they want computers to do.
The company remains small. Rosa is a solo founder supported by a distributed engineering team spanning Miami, Denver, China, and Abu Dhabi. Oasis shipped its first trackpad rings in December after years of development and hands-on assembly in South Florida.
Its funding story is also unusual. One early investor relationship began in a Texas Instruments technical forum about wireless charging, which led Rosa to a group of Australian doctors who had been exploring their own smart ring project.
“It’s funny how you meet people on the Internet,” Rosa said.
Next, Oasis plans to launch its microphone-equipped ring, deepen the WhisperFlow integration, and add more software connections.
Whether the future of computing lives in glasses, rings, or devices still to come remains unclear. But if Rosa has his way, the next shift may begin with a whisper.
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