People Love Their Phones Too Much to Use Humane's Flawed AI Pin

Imagine that you're doing some Star Trek cosplay. You tap the communicator pinned to your chest and ask the computer a question. It answers, only the answer is wrong, or you can't hear it, or the battery just ran out (again). That's the Humane AI Pin, and nobody thinks you should buy it.

The AI Pin is a wearable button that replaces your phone, using AI, cameras, microphones, and speakers to interact with you and the world around you. The promise is that you do not have to interact with your phone. Instead, it takes us a step closer to the sci-fi world of ubiquitous, intelligent, omnipresent computers. But the AI Pin has two big problems. It doesn't really work, and people don't hate their phones anyway. In fact, we love them.

"There are too many tech companies that ask 'can I do this' rather than 'should I do this' and Humane is one of those," Tony Fernandes, CEO of Silicon Valley UX firm UEGroup and founder of UserExperience.AI, told Lifewire via email. "This is a product that is too sophisticated for its own good."

Too Much and Too Little

The reviewers, like Joanna Stern from the WSJ, and David Pierce from The Verge, agree that the hardware—a tiny square tech brooch that you clip to a lapel or your chest—manages to pack in a lot. There's a camera, speakers, microphones, and a laser projector that lets you shine words onto your hands and read them.

But in use, the hardware isn't up to the job. You cannot hear the speakers outside, and you can't see the projections in daylight. The camera works fine, but you have no way to frame shots, and the AI assistant is an AI assistant. It might be better than Siri, but what isn't? And packing all this gadgetry into a tiny square tile ends with it getting hot and burning through the battery too fast.

The thing is, even if it worked perfectly, it seems like the AI Pin is solving a problem that doesn't need to be solved.

Phones Are Not the Problem

The premise of the Humane Pin is that we should be free of our phones so we can enjoy the moment. We get all the utility of a phone, only without being tied to a phone. There's a reason I used the Star Trek example at the top of this post. The Humane Pin is an attempt to bring that kind of helpful, all-knowing, always-correct assistant to our lives.

And that sounds amazing. You can be present in nature, appreciating the flowers (the AI pin can identify them if asked). You can ask about art in a gallery. But you know what? Much of the time, we're waiting in line, hanging on the sofa at home, or hanging from a strap in a subway car, desperate for a distraction. People want a screen, a screen with TikTok or Instagram, or their favorite nerd forum to read.

"They express they're trying to free people from the distraction that our current digital devices impose on our lives, but it appears they may be using this as a façade to experiment with a slightly new form of a smartphone in hope of igniting a new trend," Chris Boggs, senior UX/UI designer at Priority Designs told Lifewire via email.

And even if you are in some kind of Zen state, and you want to snap a photo of the flowers, is it really less distracting to use your phone, which will work perfectly and let you frame the shot, or to try to convince your AI pin to take the photo for you? By talking to it. In public.

"[I]t appears they may have overlooked a crucial aspect of being present and in flow: it's not solely about the technology; human behavior plays a significant role and this solution still encourages interaction with a digital assistant rather than the joy of being lost in an analog experience," Reade Harpham, principal at Priority Designs, told Lifewire via email.

The AI Pin costs $699, plus another $24 per month to use. If it worked as promised, it might be tempting. But only for a while, because the only thing phones need to compete and beat the Pin is a better voice assistant, and that's coming. Apple has already teased significant AI additions to iOS 18, available this fall, for example.

If Apple fixes Siri, you'll be able to do all the same stuff as the AI Pin, on your phone, with an optional screen, or through your AirPods, or through your Apple Watch. But even then, getting a Star Trek-grade conversation will be hard

"Latency will continue to be a key challenge for voice-based AI assistants. Existing assistants like Alexa and Siri often take around two seconds to respond, much longer than the 200 milliseconds typical in human-human conversation," Justin Uberti, CTO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, told Lifewire via email. "There are many stages involved in AI processing—from transcription to retrieval to text generation to voice generation—and it all adds up."

Update 04/16/2023: Corrected a typo in paragraph 3.