Imagine you’re doing a 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 don’t hear it, or the battery is dead (again). That’s the Humane AI Pin, and no one thinks you should buy it.
I tested the Humane AI Pin – It's no good.
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 won’t have to interact with your phone at all. Instead, it will bring us one step closer to the sci-fi world of omnipresent, intelligent, ubiquitous 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 asking ‘can I do this’ instead of ‘should I do this,’ and Humane is one of them,” Tony Fernandes, CEO of Silicon Valley UX company UEGroup and founder of UserExperience.AI, told Lifewire via email. “This is a product that’s too advanced for its own good.”
Reviewers, including the WSJ’s Joanna Stern and The Verge’s David Pierce, agree that the hardware, a small, square tech brooch that attaches to a lapel or your chest, packs a punch. There’s a camera, speakers, microphones and a laser projector that lets you shine words onto your hands and read them.
