Not even close to the Humane AI Pin review
Fish Molly: A Kerala-Style Fish Steak Stew Steak With Coconut Milk, Coconut Oil, Green Chilies, and Lemon Juice
Humane has been campaigning for a year on the idea that the upcoming Artificial Intelligence Pin is the beginning of a post- smartphone future in which humans spend less time with their heads and minds buried in the screens of their phones. It feels like fundamental questions about the future of our relationship with technology if that thing works, and if it even is possible.
Fish Molly, also known as Fish Molee, is a Kerala-style fish stew made with coconut milk, coconut oil, curry leaves, green chilies, and lemon juice. It is popular in Alleppey, one of the main tourist destinations in the state.
The Viasoro Projector: What Is It All About? Asking the AI Pin to Tell Me Where It’s From
On my parents’ TV screen, an image of a temple popped up on the Chromecast’s screensaver. I put the Ai Pin towards the screen and said, “Look and tell me where this picture is from.” What is the answer? There is a temple in Cambodia. I have no reason to doubt this, except that the Pin doesn’t have a screen 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. There were images in the search that matched the screensaver.
After you buy a Humane Ai Pin, you’ll need to set up a Humane account and passcode. Once you receive your device, all you have to do is enter your password. It’s seamless.
I have had 3 or 4 failed interactions with the AI Pin. I’ll ask the weather in New York and get the right answer; then, I’ll ask the weather in Dubai, and the AI Pin tells me that “the current weather in Dubai is not available for the provided user location in New York.” It will tell me that it is Mount Rushmore, but then I will be made to believe that the Brooklyn Bridge is the Triborough Bridge. Half the time, I don’t even get an answer. The system just waits, and waits, and fails.
The battery life is similarly rough. You will use all of it with the two battery boosters and charging case that the Pin ships with. I went through both the boosters and the smaller internal battery for just a few hours of testing. At one point, the AI Pin and a booster went from fully charged to completely dead in five hours, all while sitting untouched in my backpack. This thing is trying to do an awful lot, and it just doesn’t seem able to keep up.
There is a projector that is closest to the screen of the Ai Pin. You can summon it by tapping on the touchpad and then asking it to show me something. If the AI Pin is speaking something to you aloud, you can also pick up your hand, and it will switch to projecting the text instead. The projector is also how you access settings, unlock your device, and more.
How can I make the projector user interface look good? There are bananas. To unlock your device, which you have to do every time you magnetically reattach the AI Pin, you move your hand forward and backward through a series of numbers and then pinch your thumb and forefinger together to select a number. It feels a bit like sliding a tiny trombone. Once you’re unlocked, you see a homescreen of sorts, where you can see if you’ve gotten any recent texts or calls and tap your fingers through a menu of the time, the date, and the weather. To scroll, you tilt your hand forward and backward very slightly. To get to settings you have to move your hand away from your body and a new radial menu should come up. You are supposed to roll your hand around in a circle to navigate that menu. I swear to you, I never once managed to select the correct icon the first time. It’s way too many interaction systems to memorize, especially when none of them work very well.
It feels like Humane decided early on that the card couldn’t have a screen no matter what and did a lot of product and interface gymnastics when a little screen would have been better. If you intend to do phone things, you should just make a phone.
That’s the best-case scenario. And I have experienced it a few times! It’s very neat, and it’s the sort of thing that would take much longer and many more steps on a smartphone. I will stand in front of a restaurant, inquire about something and wait for something to fail completely. It cannot locate the restaurant, the server has not responded to it and the device has aGPS chip in it. Bongiorno says these issues can come from model hallucinations, server issues, and more, and that they’ll get better over time.
When I first started testing the AI Pin, I was excited to try it as a music player. I dream of going on walks or runs while leaving my phone at home, and the always-connected AI Pin seemed like a possible answer. It is not. For one thing, it only connects with Tidal, which means most people are immediately ruled out and also means no podcast support. For another, that connection is as broken as anything else on the AI Pin: I ask to play Beyoncé’s new album or “songs by The 1975,” and the AI Pin either can’t connect to Tidal at all or can’t play the song I’m looking for. Sometimes it works out okay. Way more often, I have interactions like this one.
That’s a real exchange I had, multiple times, over multiple days with the AI Pin. Bongiorno says this particular bug has been fixed, but I still can’t get Tidal to play Cowboy Carter consistently. It is broken.
It is made worse by the Pin wanting to be as clever as possible. The fact that it automatically discerns what languages to translate into is one of the most talked about features. When you land in Spain, boom, it switches to Spanish. It is nice and futuristic in theory. I spent an hour in the studio desperately trying to get the pin to translate to Japanese and Korean, while Victoria Song sat there talking to it in those languages. Rather than translate things, it would just say them back to her, in a horrible and occasionally almost mocking accent.
The Humane AI Pin: not even close (review: The amazingly easy, fun, and unsubtle way to do things without a smartphone)
I hope Humane keeps going. I hope it builds on this basics and finds out how to do more of it locally without compromising the battery life. I hope it gets faster and more reliable. I hope Humane makes something that is designed to be held in your hand. I hope that it provides more sources of information regarding the internet and the world. I hope the price goes down.
The AI Pin is also just incredibly unsubtle. People will notice when you tap your chest in front of a building. Everything else gets in the way. My backpack straps rubbed against it, and my messenger bag went right over it. Both my son and my dog have accidentally set the AI Pin off while climbing on top of me. If you buy this thing, I recommend also buying the $50 clip that makes it easier to attach to a waistband or a bag strap, where I actually prefer to keep it.
With a spare pinkie, you can reach it with either hand and it will wake it up. Whenever you want to speak to the computer, you have to press and hold onto the front button, which isn’t a wake word. It’s possible to ask the Pin for anything it can do. It can answer basic questions, do phone calls, snap selfies, send text messages, and more. You can also do a few things just by tapping the touchpad, like keyboard shortcuts on a computer: double-tap with two fingers to take a photo; double-tap and hold with two fingers to take a video.
Having the thing right there did make me use it more, sometimes for things I wouldn’t have bothered to pull out my phone to do. There was a time when saying “set a timer for 10 minutes” beats opening the Clock app by a mile and you can do it with sticky fingers.
Source: Humane AI Pin review: not even close
The Pin is Not Good at Anything but Something It Can’t Do (Improved vs. Provable, but Not Really Good)
As the overall state of Artificial Intelligence improves, the Pin is likely to get better, and that is good for our long-term ability to do things on our behalf. But there are too many basic things it can’t do, too many things it doesn’t do well enough, and too many things it does well but only sometimes that I’m hard-pressed to name a single thing it’s genuinely good at. The hardware, software, and GPT-4 aren’t ready yet.
