The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected, until it stopped working | Top Vip News

Look, I’m as much a Humane AI Pin skeptic as the next person. And I still think the AI-powered wearable assistant suffers from a case of this-could-have-been-an-app. But I finally got to spend some face time with the pin this morning, and you know what? It’s a cool gadget. It’s just buried under such a thick layer of marketing that it’s hard to appreciate what it could really be if Humane weren’t so serious.

If you spend time on Tech Threads or similar, you probably already know what the pin does: you clip it to your shirt, talk to it, and it uses generative AI to respond. It is a standalone device with its own SIM card and has no screen, just vibrations. That, and a tiny laser that projects menus and text into the palm of your hand so you can interact with deadly details like Wi-Fi settings and media playback controls.

The idea, reiterated as I watched a couple of Humane employees perform various demonstrations, was that it’s meant to help you stay connected while you unplug a little: less staring at screens and more living in the moment. AI helps retrieve relevant bits from your calendar and email, and answers your questions when you’re curious about the world around you.

It’s all very nice, but let’s be realistic: this is not a philosophy, it is a gadget. Gadgets are fun, useful, and frustrating, and all of the above seems to apply to the Humane pin.

The AI ​​Pin was really impressive at times. There is a Vision feature that will use the camera to scan the scene in front of you when prompted, analyze what’s there and describe it out loud. I stood in front of a Humane spokesperson while testing this feature and, frankly, it nailed it. He described Mobile World Congress as “an indoor event or exhibition with people walking around.” Easy enough.

But he also pointed out the Qualcomm name on the sign behind me and, obviously, reading the badge around my neck, identified me as “a person wearing a branded lanyard.” The edge.” Too many, but pretty impressive considering I wasn’t standing that close to the pin and the lighting was dim.

Gesture navigation was also impressive – smoother and more responsive than I thought. I wasn’t allowed to put the pin on and it’s difficult to get to the right place to project the laser on your own hand since it’s really a single-user device. I tried. But a couple of Humane employees who demonstrated the product, who obviously had a lot of practice with it, navigated the projected menus quickly and easily by simply tilting their hands and pinching two fingers together.

But the pin is not immune to what devices tend to do: frustrate the hell out of you. Most of the AI ​​is off the device, so there’s a few seconds of waiting to get responses to your requests and questions, which doesn’t help with the convention center’s spotty connectivity. It also shut down on one occasion after briefly displaying a warning that it had overheated and needed to cool down. The employee who showed me the pin said that this doesn’t happen very often and that the continued use of the laser for demonstration purposes probably did it. I think so, but still, this is a device designed to sit next to your chest and go with you into many different environments, presumably including warm ones. Not good!

The laser projection is clearer than I imagined, but it’s still essentially light projected onto the palm of your hand. His hands are not evenly flat and it is difficult to keep them completely still. The text dances in front of you and, while it is not difficult to read, it is is harder than reading, say, text on a smartphone.

It’s also impossible to get a sense of what it’s like to live with this in the hall of a convention center. Could a cotton shirt support its weight? How easy is it to see the laser outside in direct sun? Would people understand why the “trust light” is on? Does the Pin occasionally make things up, like some AI tends to do? I have a lot more questions than answers, but I guess at least I have more than zero answers now that I have seen it with my own eyes.

My first impression of the Pin is that there are something there, but it is not he stuff. And the problem is that all of Humane’s marketing has been developed to be the thing. It was first introduced in a TED Talk, for God’s sake – it’s like ground zero for people who take themselves too seriously. Humane’s Sai Kambampati told me that the AI ​​Pin is not intended to be a smartphone replacement. But it has its own data connection, its own monthly subscription fee, and its own $699 smartphone price. Forks… No Are you supposed to replace your phone?

Whatever the future holds for us in mobile computing, I have a feeling it’s not quite the AI ​​Pin as I saw it demonstrated today. There’s a lot more testing I want to do when the pin officially arrives in April. Meanwhile, I didn’t exactly see the future, but I did see a cool device, but don’t take it too seriously.

Photography by Allison Johnson/The Verge