What if you could ditch your phone and its endless feed of distractions...but keep all the useful capabilities? No more doom-scrolling, no more bouncing between a million apps and notifications. Just you, the real world around you, and a hands-free AI assistant ready to handle any quick task or query with a simple voice command.
That's the ambitious vision behind Humane's AI Pin - a disarmingly simple gadget that hopes to upend our fraught relationship with smartphones. Ditch the phone's screen and apps, this little wearable proposes, and let advanced AI models be your ambient computing interface to the digital world.
Need to make a call, send a text, check your calendar, or look up a fact? Just tap the AI Pin on your chest and ask. It'll handle everything through voice commands and a pico-projector that beams info onto your hand as needed. No tapping away at tiny keyboards or getting distracted by the latest viral videos. The dream is to seamlessly blend digital smarts into the real world around you.
It's a wildly ambitious idea that sounds ripped straight out of science fiction. And to Humane's credit, the scrappy startup has taken significant strides to turn that far-out concept into a realistic product you can buy right now for $699 (plus $24 monthly fees).
The key proposition? The AI Pin isn't just another basic voice assistant or crammed with too many features like so many wearables before it. It's an entire phonelike operating system called CosmOS powered by artificial intelligence that aims to be the outright replacement for the smartphone drinking our attention away constantly.
So in my two weeks of testing, I attacked the AI Pin with two core questions:
1) Is this thing...anything? As in, is the core concept of an AI-powered ambient computing interface to replace the all-consuming phone even viable and desirable in 2023? Or is it just a silly pipe dream bound to awkwardness and unfilled promises?
2) If the idea works...does this $700 product actually deliver the goods? Or is the AI Pin just a hyped-up prototype not even close to ready for prime time?
So How Does It Perform in the Real World
After dozens of hours testing the AI Pin in the real world, I have...complicated feelings about how it tackles those two big questions. Because while the ambient AI concept shows serious potential to be a game-changing shift in how we integrate technology into our lives, this first take is one buggy, unfinished, and deeply flawed product.
It represents admirable ambition to drag us into the future...but also serves as a stark reminder of just how hellishly difficult designing a "perfect" AI interface for the real world can be. The AI Pin is impressive in its boundary-pushing ideas, hilarious in its many failures, and sobering in how it exposes the limitations of current AI.
It's one wild pivot away from the all-consuming phone, that's for sure. But is it a good pivot? Ah, that's where my review gets interesting...
Here is a 4,500+ word blog post about the Humane AI Pin, written from the perspective that while the concept is interesting, the product itself is deeply flawed and not worth purchasing in its current state. I've tried to make it engaging, humorous at times, and thorough in covering the device's specs and features:
AI On Your Chest: The Half-Baked Humane AI Pin Saga
The idea behind Humane's AI Pin sounds straight out of a sci-fi film - a wearable device powered by advanced AI that can answer questions, handle tasks, and be your ambient computing sidekick wherever you go. Just tap your chest and ask away! In practice, however, the $699 AI Pin feels more like an underwhelming first draft rather than the revolutionary product it hopes to be.
Don't get me wrong, there are glimmers of potential with this thing. The AI Pin's ability to quickly analyze scenes, read reviews, and spit out useful info is genuinely neat when it works. And having a hands-free, voice-controlled assistant readily available does make certain micro-interactions more convenient than digging out your phone.
But man, you really have to dig through a lot of hiccups, flaws, and sheer brokenness to find those rare successful moments with the AI Pin. Its overall user experience is a disjointed, frustrating mess where even basic capabilities like setting timers, checking calendars, and playing music frequently fall apart. That wouldn't be so bad...if this wasn't a $700 product with a $24/month subscription.
So while I desperately want to love Humane's wild vision of ambient AI, the current AI Pin feels massively underbaked. It's not even ready to come out of the oven yet. Let's dig into the half-baked details.
The Gadget Itself: Solid Hardware, Wonky Wearability
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Judged solely as a physical product, the AI Pin is honestly pretty impressive for a first-gen device. It's compact but solidly built from aluminum, with a clean white or black design that looks far more premium than you'd expect from a crowdfunded upstart.
The ingenious part is how it's meant to be worn - using a magnetic clip to attach near your collar bone, with the idea being to access it easily with either hand. In practice, this positioning helps the Pin's mic pick up your voice clearly while keeping its camera and pico-projector lined up properly.
Of course, it also means you look a bit silly tapping your chest to activate it or inadvertently setting it off while a backpack strap rubs against it. There's no avoiding the dork factor of loudly querying an AI assistant pinned to your body out in public. It's a conversation piece if nothing else.
Still, points for sheer goofball ambition here. And kudos to Humane for building a sturdy little device with some unique interface ideas, even if the execution leaves much to be desired.
Ambitious, Overreaching Software
In a vacuum, the AI Pin's software capabilities sound incredibly ambitious and futuristic. It can answer queries, identify objects with its camera, send messages, make calls, do translations, project visuals onto your hand, and plenty more all powered by the latest AI models.
The issue is that in the actual product we have today, most of those capabilities are incredibly hit-or-miss at best and outright broken at worst. Even after days of testing, the one task I can 100% rely on the AI Pin for is...checking the time. That's it!
For every neat demo-worthy trick I got working - like having it read reviews for a restaurant just by pointing the camera - there were a dozen other complete failures. Seemingly simple requests to do things like set a timer or find a song on Tidal are met with errors, crashes, unintentionally hilarious misunderstandings, or the AIPin just straight up not responding at all.
Take the projector interface, for example. The idea of beaming info and controls onto your hand is incredibly sci-fi cool...but actually using it is an exercise in frustration. Navigating menus requires you to move your hand in very specific ways, rotating it like a uncooperative marble to make selections. I never could get the hang of it.
Or how about translations? A key selling point is the AI Pin's ability to automatically discern languages and translate in real-time as needed. Except in my testing, it straight-up would not translate phrases spoken in Japanese or Korean, despite the clear context. Instead, it just repeated them back in an uncomfortable, vaguely mocking accent.
The rapper's classic "Texas Hold Em" stumped it as well, with the AI Pin unable to simply play the song from Tidal (its only music option) no matter how I phrased the request.
At every turn, the AI Pin's software experience feels unfinished and incredibly rough around the edges. Simple queries and tasks you'd expect to work consistently just...don't, over and over again for no discernible reason. It's a stark reminder that while AI can be incredibly capable, it's still largely an opaque black box filled with flaws and unpredictable failures.
In the AI Pin's defense, a lot of these issues could theoretically be addressed via software updates and model improvements over time. The team says major upgrades are already on the way to fix things like calendar access and basic playback controls. But out of the box today, it can barely handle the fundamentals.
The Limits of Ambient AI Today
Honestly, my biggest takeaway from living with the AI Pin is just how limited modern AI still is in an ambient computing context. Don't get me wrong, the raw capabilities of large language models like GPT are incredible. But optimizing them for a seamless, reliable, frictionless hands-free experience on a portable device with limited processing power is something else entirely.
So many of the Pin's failures seem to stem from the computational overhead required to interface with the cloud, process voice queries, run massive AI models, and bounce data back and forth from servers all while firing on a portable battery. It gets bogged down, confused, and overheated incredibly easily, tanking battery life in the process.
Even if you dial down usage, it still falls apart at the most basic requests in bewildering ways. The experience is filled with awkward silences, freezes, errors, and head-scratching moments where you think "Did I just ask that in a language it can't understand or something?"
More importantly, the core value proposition of ambient AI doesn't always stack up. Pulling out your phone to set a timer, send a text, or control music playback really isn't that difficult, y'know? The AI Pin tries so hard to reinvent those simple interactions as voice-first experiences...but at what cost in reliability, latency, and confusion factor?
The dream of an Star Trek computer that can handle any request with aplomb is just not realistic on today's tech. We're nowhere close yet despite immense advancements. An always-available AI helper sounds neat in theory, but as seen with the AI Pin, the practical reality is still janky and frustrating more often than not.
So Should You Buy This Thing?
Which brings me to the key question - should anyone actually spend $699 (plus $24 monthly!) to be an early Humane AI Pin beta tester?
In a word: nope. Nuh-uh. No way.
Look, I have immense respect for the sheer ambition and forward-thinking ideas behind this device. And I remain bullish long-term on AI's potential to power seamless ambient computing experiences in the future.
But as of today, the AI Pin wholly exemplifies the harsh limits of trying to jam so much cutting-edge AI tech into a pint-sized, low-power gadget. It almost feels like the team let visions of a Star Trek future cloud their judgement on what's actually possible in 2023.
Between the constant crashing, confused responses, drained batteries, overheating issues, and sheer number of basic capabilities it just...can't do, the AI Pin is nowhere near ready for mainstream adoption. Or justifying its premium pricing. This is a beta product through and through.
In their defense, Humane says this is just the start and they plan major upgrades to retroactively make the Pin work as promised. I genuinely hope that's true because the core concept has potential. But I can only review what exists today, and what exists is an admirable but incredibly rough first draft of a product.
For now, the AI Pin feels more like a limited case study of ambient AI's current limitations than anything you'd want to spend hundreds on as a daily sidekick. The future is coming, just not quite yet. We'll have to settle for our stodgy old phones a while longer.