The End of the Line for Mobile Handsets: AIPin Ushers in a New Era
Sanjay Kumar Sharma
Software Developer | Live Streaming | Broadcast | OTT | IP Transmission | Crafting Innovative Solutions for a Connected World
“This is what?I messaged you about!”
That was my mom's reaction when she saw me wearing the?Humane Ai Pin. This new artificial-intelligence-enabled wearable lets you?access the power?of AI models such as OpenAI's?ChatGPT 4.0 and Google's Gemini, plus a mix of others, wherever you are with a simple tap of the finger. My mom learned about it by watching her routine Indian news—a testament to the far-reaching buzz that Humane's first product has generated.
She naturally wanted to see it in action, and I was happy to oblige. She was cooking in the kitchen, so I tapped on the Ai Pin and said, “Look and tell me what this is.” It took a glance at what was in front of me using its onboard camera, then told me I was staring at lettuce. (Correct!) My mom asked me to peel a cucumber, so I tapped the device to wake it up, then asked, “Do you need to peel a cucumber?” The Pin said it's unnecessary unless the skin has been waxed or you plan to cook with it. My mom said she was making fish molee, so I asked the Pin what it was and, to our surprise, it understood and answered:
This went on for a bit, but I increasingly began to doubt the accuracy of the information the Humane wearable was providing. My mom told me to avoid high-fructose corn syrup right as my dad handed me a bottle of Malta Goya—she said the sweetener in it was banned in California. The Ai Pin agreed with this when I asked it. However, California did?not?ban it; the state banned?four food additives last year, none of which are high-fructose corn syrup.
On my parents' TV screen, an image of a temple popped up on the Chromecast's screensaver. My dad asked where it was, so I positioned my Ai Pin toward the screen and said, “Look and tell me where this picture is from.” The answer? Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I didn't have a specific reason to doubt this, but because the Pin doesn't have a proper screen, there's no way to verify it. I launched Google Lens on my phone, pointed the camera at the screen, and … well, the temple is the Phraya Nakhon Cave in Thailand. The images in the Google search matched perfectly with the screensaver.
Not being able to fully trust the results from the Ai Pin's Ai Mic and Vision features (the latter is still in beta) is just one problem with this wearable computer. Unfortunately, there's not much else to do with it as it's missing a great many features. The Humane Ai Pin could be an interesting gadget a year from now after promised software updates, but at the moment it's a party trick.
Put a Pin in It
After you buy a Humane Ai Pin, you'll need to set up a Humane account and passcode. This way, once you receive your device, everything is ready to go; just enter your passcode. It's seamless.
My colleague Paresh Dave wrote last year about how the?Ai Pin works, but here's a recap. There are two main components. The part that houses all the main bits—the computer, microphones, speaker, camera, touchpad, and projector—is outward-facing. The second component is the Battery Booster, which magnetically sticks to the back of the Ai Pin. This Booster is how you clip the pin to your clothing; it goes under a shirt or jacket and the Pin magnetically sticks over it. It's meant to rest on your torso.
The Booster's magnet might not work with every type of clothing, so if you have a thick jacket, you'll have to buy and use a?Clip magnet?to keep it secure. (There's no battery here.) If you're wearing a lightweight fabric, you'll want to use?the Latch, which also doesn't have a battery and is lighter, preventing the Pin from tugging on the fabric. There are also?Shields?you can snag to add some color to the outer shell of the Ai Pin, though I don't expect this thin, flexible plastic to do much shielding if you drop the device. There's an Apple-like level of polish to the system and the accessories, likely because Humane's founders hail from Apple.
The Pin itself has a built-in battery that runs for roughly four hours, but the Booster increases that to nine hours. An additional Battery Booster, a Charge Pad, a USB-C cable and adapter, and a Charge Case are included in every order. The charging adapter has a sideways-facing USB-C port so that it doesn't stick out too much from an outlet, the cable is braided and feels exquisite, and it connects to the Charge Pad, which lets you toss a Booster on it (or a Booster with the Pin) to keep it topped up wirelessly. The chrome Charge Case looks and feels like a large egg—reminiscent of?Google's Pixel Buds Pro wireless earbuds case—and is a handy way to recharge the battery when you're not home.
I usually keep a Booster in the Charge Case and swap it out when the Booster on the Ai Pin dies (you'll get an audio alert). This is usually enough to get through most of the day without issue, though if everything dies, you can pop the Pin with the Booster into the Charge Case and use a USB-C cable to bring it all back to life.
The Ai Pin comes with an LTE connection powered by T-Mobile's network, which means you?have?to pay $24 per month for the whole thing to work. (You get three months free to start.) If you stop paying the data bill, the Ai Pin will become “inoperable.” This subscription keeps it connected even if you go out of the country, plus you get unlimited domestic talk and text, and it's what helps pay for cloud data storage and AI service access.
OK, so what do you do with the Humane Ai Pin? Well, there's no hot word to activate it, so you will always have to tap and hold on to the touchpad and speak for any request. You can ask it anything you'd typically type into Google. The Ai Pin will read out its answer (it takes quite a long pause to think), but lifting your palm in front of the device will activate the “Laser Ink Display” and silence the spoken response. Yep, a projector displays the results on your palm. I have a lot more to say about it below, but it's weird!
With two fingers on the touchpad, a tap and hold will initiate translation mode, and this is where you can translate what you're saying into a different language, or have what someone else is saying translated into English. I got a chance to try it with someone who speaks Spanish, and it worked fairly well.
The Ai Pin is a camera too. A two-finger double-tap takes a photo, and a two-finger double-tap press and hold captures a 15-second video; an LED lights up to indicate that it's capturing footage, and photos trigger a purposeful shutter sound. You can have the device stream music as well, but you'll have to sign up for a Tidal subscription (other music services are on the way). Bluetooth connectivity means you can pair it with wireless earbuds and stream audio straight to your ears.
Anything and everything you do with the Ai Pin is accessible through a web portal called the?Humane Center. This is where you can see photos and videos, which are available in high resolution only when the Pin is on Wi-Fi and charging. You can review a list of the music you've listened to, and connect to third-party services like Tidal. The Humane Center also shows the history of all the things you've asked the Ai Pin along with notes?you've asked it to remember. If that sounds like a privacy nightmare, just know there's two-factor authentication when you log in to your Humane Center on a new device. Here's what the company had to say about the collated data:
“Under normal circumstances, you should never expect these to be viewed by anyone at Humane as all customer data is protected by encryption along with strict and protective access control measures,” says Bethany Bongiorno, Humane cofounder. “Exceptions to this include complying with legal requirements like a subpoena.”
For security reasons, you can't access any text messages you've sent with the pin, and this is a point of frustration … which leads me to all the quirks and issues I have with this device.
On Pins and Needles
I'm going to say it now: Humane's laser projector display is never going to take off as a viable method of interacting with a gadget. It's overly sensitive and slow to navigate. When the projection lands on your palm, you have to tilt your hand around in a circular motion to scroll through the icons until you land on the one you want to select. But tilt too much, and it moves past the icon you want, landing on the thing next to it. It's just plain annoying. Using the projected interface to run through old text messages is also a chore—and yes, you can ask the Ai Pin to read your messages, but that's just not going to work all the time.
Texting itself is a mixed bag. It doesn't help that there's no way to sync your Humane Ai Pin's number with your personal number (though this might come to the device later). You can import your contacts from Google, Apple, or Microsoft, but you'll have to remind anyone you call or text who you are and why you're using a different number. You can't add new contacts through the Pin yet. You have to designate people as “trusted contacts” if you want to get an alert from a text; otherwise, the only way to know you have a message is by using the projector to see whether you have unread messages, or if you say, “Catch me up,” which prompts the Pin to speak any notifications you've missed.
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I had some strange issues when I asked the Ai Pin to send me a text too. You'd think if I said, “Send a message to …” followed by someone's name, then the next prompt would be to ask me what the message is, right? No, the Humane Ai Pin asked me whether I wanted to send “Send a message” to my friend, as if I’m some kind of Mafia boss commanding a goon to whack someone. It does the same thing when you ask it to “text” someone. Instead, you have to be a bit more conversational: “Tell Chris I’ll be there at the bachelor party,” which worked.
Frankly, it was a little shocking when I found out that the Pin moderates what you say in a message. When I jokingly tried to tell a friend, “You're dumb,” the Pin did not send the message and cited “offensive language.” Turns out, you have to say “Dictate” if you want it to transcribe your message verbatim. Rifling through texts also feels laggy—messages sometimes take a few seconds to load when you're using the projector.
Speaking of, it's impossible to see what's projected on your palm once you walk outside in daylight. The projector is just not bright enough to stay visible. This is a problem if you haven't entered the passcode to unlock the Ai Pin because it's so hard to see the numbers when you're outside. Humane says it's working on a way to input your passcode via your voice, but it's just baffling that the only “display” is completely useless if you're not in a shady spot.
You have to tap the touchpad to activate the projector, then put your palm up. (This doesn't always work; for the past two hours, the projector has refused to show up on my device.) The green laser it shoots out also lingers for a split second after you put your palm down. This has proven problematic. I wore the Ai Pin to a friend's birthday party, and every time I used the projector, the person sitting far across from me at the dinner table kept wincing and I'd see the green light flash across her face. After a few times, she locked eyes with me and gave me a kind “Please stop doing that” look. Oops.
Then there are the thermal issues. One time, after asking the Ai Pin three questions, the Pin alerted me that it was too hot and needed to cool down. Indeed, the touchpad and the sides of the device were uncomfortably hot. I haven't run into that problem since, but my fellow reviewers?Cherlynn Low at Engadget,?Chris Velazco at?The Washington Post, and?YouTuber Michael Fisher?have all run into the same issue, though they seem to have had it worse. (I touched the Ai Pin that Low was testing and it felt shockingly hot.) Humane says it's “working to improve overall thermal performance in the next software release.”
You don't feel a notable amount of heat on the side of the battery that touches your body. However, it emanates this light warmth that is still hard to ignore, especially if you're wearing a light hoodie or a T-shirt. It just makes my body feel a bit warmer in that one specific area.
It's better to put the Ai Pin on a jacket, but here comes a security conundrum. The Ai Pin requires you to enter a passcode by default if the device is separated from the Battery Booster (which happens anytime you remove it or readjust it). However, if you simply forget to take it off your jacket, say, at coat check, someone can just put your jacket on and access all your texts. If it's any consolation, in the device's settings, you can have the Ai Pin require a passcode every 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
Pin Drop
There are some positives! I have made phone calls with the Ai Pin—the person on the other end said I didn't sound great—but it was nice not having to hold a phone up to my face. (See also:?wireless earbuds.) I've also liked using it to take photos and videos. That is, I like the ease of it. The quality of the images and videos captured during the day is decent, but that quality deteriorates?quickly?in any kind of low light. The photos I took at a dim restaurant for my friend's birthday party are useless.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that other people think I'm wearing a body camera, and that's just awkward. A bartender asked me why I was wearing a camera, and I had to explain that this wasn't the device's primary function. I've had a few other people ask me nicely about it as well, but I'm a little on edge about someone bringing it up in a confrontational way. (Dang?glassholes.)
Ultimately the problem with the Humane Ai Pin is that there isn't much else to do with it. I can't use it to call an Uber or Lyft to my location. I can ask for a nearby coffee shop, but it doesn't know how to navigate me to it. I can't access my work calendar to ask what's on my schedule. I can ask it to remember something, but it can't remind me of said thing. (I told it that I had an appointment in the city the next day, and the following morning I asked what was on my schedule, and the Pin read out a random text message I got a week ago.) I can't even set a timer or ask the Ai Pin to share a photo I've captured with the device. It's ridiculous that it's?this?bare-bones at launch, though the company says many of these features will arrive over time.
Whenever I went out with it, I found myself barely using it. I'd ask it maybe three to four things, partly just to try a feature out. I'd then get disappointed with the results. I asked it when the next J train would arrive at my local subway station, and it said that information was not available (even though it's on my phone in Google Maps!). I started wearing the Ai Pin less and less. I know the cofounders created it as a way to stay rooted in the real world and to avoid having a screen in front of your face all the time, but to achieve that goal, this thing needs to be 100 percent reliable.?All?the time.
It reminds me of the original allure of having?smart speakers?and?smart displays?littered around the house. It was exciting to have access to Alexa and Google Assistant no matter what room I was in, and at least those assistants could control my smart home devices. A few comparisons with my Nest Hub proved that Google's answers were consistent with the results from the Ai Pin. I also compared it directly with?Gemini on my phone?and saw comparable results, though I preferred having a proper screen to see the answer.
Humane has potential with the Ai Pin. I like being able to access an assistant so quickly, but right now, there's nothing here that makes me want to use it over my smartphone. Humane says this is just version 1.0 and that many of the missing features I've mentioned will arrive later. I'll be happy to give it another go then. But I have to review the device in my hands right now, not what the product may or may not be in the future. Just look at?carmaker Fisker—version 2.0 of its software addresses some issues with its electric vehicle, but the company?might not even exist?a year from now.
I hope that doesn't happen with Humane. I'm excited to see where this technology takes us, but this first-generation product desperately needs more integrations—dare I say “apps”—if it ever wants a shot of someday replacing my phone.
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