AI Pin: the smartphone killer?

Back in April, at TED, the company Humane, gave a sneak peak of their smartphone killer, see their video here. Though they did not say it as a smartphone killer, but their pitch that it does not come with a screen and does not require a smartphone say otherwise. Fast forward to today, the company finally released their product, the AIPin, see their introduction video, with a US$699 price-point and requires a US$24 a month of subscription, essentially a mobile service that handles internet connection and voice calls, and maybe a fraction of it goes to their cloud service.

Interacting with the AI Pin, though they call it Ai Pin for some reason but it is essentially an OpenAI/ChatGPT device, is primarily by using voice with a couple of gesture and touch recognition. It is a battery operated device that is always connected to the internet for its smarts (apart from some voice and gesture controls, IMHO) and has a built-in microphone, a speaker (personic speaker), a camera, a laser projection system, a touch sensitive pad, and a couple of LEDs (one for notification, the beacon, and another for transparency, the “trust light”). Sounds impressive?

This reminds us of the Star Trek badge that is worn on the chest. Tap it and you issue all commands using your voice and the computer on the starship responds. The AI Pin is futuristic, right? Well, not quite. First, it relies on ChatGPT, which is not reliable, IMHO. Unlike the on-board computer on the Star Trek starships, this one is prone to hallucinations.

A snippet from science.nasa.gov showing the next total solar eclipse with Australia no where in the path. The next image below is AI Pin’s response.

If you did not notice on the video, there was also a considerable delay in the processing of the voice command – I am not sure if it was a processing issue, network connection issue or both.

Anyway, as someone who has tried a lot of voice assistants, smart watches and even the Google Glass, interacting solely on voice is not ideal in general. If you are alone in a room, maybe, but voicing out commands in public has not taken off in my opinion. Even with their “personic speakers”, having your messages, calendar, email summary, among other things, read out loud is not anybody’s cup of tea. Yes, you can pair a bluetooth earbud or read off of your palm (imagine scrolling through several lines of text) for privacy, but you still need to voice out your commands.

Even if you are comfortable issuing commands by voice, are you comfortable not knowing where the information it is feeding you is coming from – is it from a trusted source or a hallucination? For instance, asking the AI Pin for the price of an item, in the demo it was a book, raises questions such as where did the price come from? Is it the best price? Paperback or hard-bound or ebook? Again, it is a matter of trust, and as per the demo, it is lacking.

The company is leveraging their experience at Apple to market this product. However, whilst it looks like an Apple product, I think the NO’s they have chosen to answer weren’t the correct ones.

If it were a stand-alone smartwatch with less reliance on a Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI) model like ChatGPT, then maybe they’d have something going. However, this portable voice assistant simply wouldn’t cut it. Sorry, Humane, this isn’t a smartphone killer, and it is not for me.

In my humble opinion, the closest you can get as a gadget that weans you off of the smartphone is the Apple Watch, and yes, it still has a screen.