The people who invented and designed the iPhone tried to create a new product to disrupt the smartphone, but it seems that they have failed.
The world's first dedicated AI wearable device, the Ai Pin, has finally begun to be delivered.
Before the AI wave in 2023, R&D company Humane received $240 million in investment from the industry with a single product, and the investors were all technology giants such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Qualcomm, and it was selected as the "2023 Invention of the Year" by Time, and was once considered by Silicon Valley to be "a revolutionary product that can disrupt smartphones".
When the AI PIN was launched, we saw in the promotional video the combination of hardware and software, the interaction of voice control and projection, the integration of reality and large language models, and most importantly: it does not need to rely on a mobile phone as the center. It's like a hardware avatar of ChatGPT, relying on AI to upend our mobile-addicted world.
With the first batch of AI Pins shipping in mid-April and the first wave of media reviews lifted, the experience was nothing short of stunning compared to the five-year marketing process.
From high-profile to badly reviewed, what kind of product is Ai Pin?
01
Humane vs. Ai Pin
Ai Pin, from Humane, is also the company's only product. Perhaps because there are enough digital devices extending around our hands, eyes, wrists, and ears, Humane has positioned the AI Pin on the chest.
As the name suggests, Ai Pin is a square device as big as a brooch, don't use it on the chest, Ai Pin does not have a screen, but relies on voice commands, touch the panel, make gestures in the air, and project to the palm of the hand for display.
Projection to the palm of the palm is very technological|Source: Inverse
Beyond the brooch style and new interactions, looking at the hardware alone, it's more like a smartphone without a screen: a built-in 2.1 GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 4G of RAM and 32 GB of storage, a 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera, a 3D depth sensor, a motion sensor, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, GPS, a microphone and speakers.
The accumulation of materials on the small "brooch" is also to serve the original purpose of its birth: AI.
Although no technical details were given, Humane mentioned that the Ai Pin was a collaboration with Open AI and may have used a custom GPT-4 model. So users don't need to take out their phones, open their browsers, go to the ChatGPT webpage, and enter the questions they want to ask. All you need to do is wear an Ai Pin, press the panel, ask for an answer, and you can get a voice answer from GPT-4.
实时双语互译|图源:Human
Ai Pin doesn't just want to be a hardware version of ChatGPT, it wants to be an AI assistant that you carry with you and can solve all your problems.
Unlike other voice assistants, Siri can understand and execute "play Jay Chou's songs", but Ai Pin can understand "play a few songs composed by Jay Chou but not sung by Jay Chou." Siri can understand "send a message to Xiao Ji, 'Let's have a meal tomorrow'", but the AI Pin can perform "Send a message to Xiao Ji in a more friendly and excited tone to say 'Let's have a meal tomorrow'"
Even say "Catch Me Up" to Ai Pin, and it will summarize the user's emails, messages, and calls and report them, such as "Finance sent you this month's salary sheet", "Geek Park released a new article about Ai Pin", "Xiao Ji asked you to eat next week", ......
At the same time, Ai Pin also makes full use of its hardware, users can take a picture of their lunch and ask "How much protein is in this meal I eat, and does it meet the recommended daily intake?", and when reading a book in a bookstore, they can directly ask "How much does this book sell online?" and can also take photos and videos at any time to record their lives. It also relies on microphones and speakers for real-time two-way translation and supports 50 languages.
Humane's creative approach to gestures and AI interaction is even more amazing than Vision Pro's. The palm of the hand is the screen that carries the projection, the fingers are pinched together to interact, the gesture can be swiped to different menus with a wave of the hand, the tilt of the palm can be clicked like a touch screen, and the fist can return to the home page.
手势操作|图源:Human
At a time when wearable devices such as smart headsets and smart glasses are popular, Ai Pin has come up with a silky experience that seems to be almost insensible. On the AI Pin, you can see GoPro, Vision Pro, lavalier microphone, translator, smartphone, ChatGPT, Siri, and all kinds of software and hardware.
The hardware design of the Ai Pin is simple and elegant, and the interaction is also smart and silky, and the demo video has a "subversive feeling" that occurred during the iPod and iPhone launch events. This may have something to do with the Apple background of Ai Pin's "parents", the two co-founders of Humane.
Ai Pin's accessories|Source: Inverse
Humane's two founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, who spent 8 years as director of software engineering at Apple and worked on iOS, iPhone, and iPad, and Imran Chaudhri, who worked in Apple's design department for more than 21 years, most recently as Apple's design director, designed the iPhone slide and drag interaction, the home screen, and even the iPhone He has a copy of the touch screen patents.
Bethany Bongiorno 和 Imran Choudhury|图源:纽约时报
The two bonded while working at Apple, leaving Apple at the end of 2016 to start Humane in 2018 and start building Ai Pin. According to LinkedIn, about 100 of Humane's roughly 260 employees have worked at Apple. This makes Humane a company with a strong "fruity flavor" from the design language to the product form.
The purpose of AI Pin is also very "idealistic": to leave behind the usefulness of smartphones and abandon their addiction. José Benitez Cong, an employee of Humane and a longtime Apple executive, said in an interview that he hated the impact of the invention of the iPhone on society, and that his son would imitate adults when he was 1 year old. (Even though the interaction design was from his boss.) ）
Chaudhri 在 TED 上演讲｜图源：TED
In the end, the Ai Pin is priced at US$699 (about 5,058 yuan), and the user has to pay a "software fee" of US$24 (about 173 yuan) every month to use the Ai Pin. 」
However, the above information is either the promotion and demonstration of AI Pin, or the objective pricing and parameter introduction. Returning to the actual application, the experience of Ai Pin can be said to be disastrous.
02
Don't look at advertisements to see the efficacy,
The actual experience was terrible
At eight o'clock in the morning on April 11th, the Ai Pin review ban was lifted, and in the evaluation of major media, it was difficult to see excitement and excitement, and it was difficult to hide disappointment and criticism.
The headlines of the major media outlets are also very straightforward: "Humane's Ai Pin still makes me feel stupid" - Engadget, "Wearable, the "second brain" that can be touched is still too basic and not that useful" - Wired, "I've been wearing a $699 Ai Pin on my chest, you don't wear it" - The Washington Post, "Reviewing Ai Pin: It's Not Relevant." Just one question: It doesn't work" – The Verge, the only slightly mild title from Inverse "Ai Pin isn't ready to replace your phone, but maybe someday".
The most intuitive bad experience comes from the somatosensory and hardware design, the Ai Pin is not heavy, only 55 grams, but needs to be clipped to the sides of the garment with a magnetic battery. Not only will the neckline of the garment fall, but the user's body surface will also come into direct contact with the battery, resulting in a noticeable foreign body sensation, and the battery will also heat up while running, according to Engadget's Cherlynn Low, who says the battery is so hot that it burns her skin.
Looking for the right projection angle|Source: Engadget
David Pierce, the author of The Verge, said that his son and dog had dropped the Ai Pin when they were lying on top of him, and the strap of the shoulder bag often hung on the front of the Ai Pin. Inverse's Raymond Wong described his Ai Pin pinned to his shirt being blown straight to the ground by a storm.
Ai Pin's "screen" is the projection, itself only has a resolution of 720P, and the font will be blurred in the indoor dark environment, and it will flicker all the time, but it can still see the content clearly, and in the daylight environment, the projection will become greener and greener until it disappears completely. Ai Pins also often say "overheated, can't run", and Wired's test for this is "three problems will cause overheating".
And unlike the projector, which can be projected on other planes, Ai Pin can only be projected to the palm of the hand, and the projection size is fixed, for users with small palms, it is necessary to stretch the hand to make the projection display complete. It is conceivable that in the coming summer, users who wear T-shirts outdoors are likely to have difficulty using AI Pins at both the hardware and software levels.
到户外,投影就变成「如投」|图源:The Verge
In low-light environments, the camera is blurry and produces a lot of noise to the point of unusability, with poor dynamic range and no shadow detail, which at first glance looks very much like a photo taken on an iPhone 4.
Left: Photo taken by Ai Pin Right: Photo taken by iPhone 15 Pro |
Not to mention putting on a coat, even if the user has long hair, it is possible to block the camera of the Ai Pin. After all, it looks obvious, shaped like an action camera or a lavalier microphone, it is difficult not to arouse the alarm of others, and many people have mentioned that they have been asked by passers-by, security guards, bartenders, etc., "Why are you wearing a camera?" and "Are you shooting?"
The silky interaction in the demo is not satisfactory in the actual experience. For example, the interaction of tilting the palm of the hand to click, Chris Velazco of the Washington Post said that he used Ai Pin for two weeks and still couldn't choose the right option.
This is much more difficult than the Vision Pro's gaze|Source: The Verge
Even worse than hardware is software, where AI assistants are unresponsive, or simply unresponsive conversations are the norm for AI Pins.
Asking basic questions such as "What's the weather?" has to wait six seconds before being answered, and they have already finished answering by mainstream voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Xiao Ai. It also takes six or seven seconds to send a message. Even when setting an alarm, the Ai Pin responds for five seconds and then answers, "This feature is not supported at this time, and it will be updated in the future." Even if you ask a simple question such as the weather, users can only ask about the weather in their own location, and if they ask other places, they will also give feedback that "not applicable", and there are no basic functions such as navigation, stopwatch, calendar, and timer.
Even if it's a question that only it can answer, such as "How many calories is in this bottle of Coke?", it has to respond to recognition questions for as little as ten seconds, and the key is that it often makes mistakes. The Verge directly showed the situation of AI Pins identifying the wrong drinks and bridges in the review, and they said, "One successful interaction with AI Pins is behind three to four unsuccessful attempts. 」
Moreover, Ai Pin also has the same problem as ChatGPT, Gemini and other large language models: they can't understand the hard answer to the question. For example, if asked, "What kind of flower is this?", it replied, "It's a yellow flower with red stripes in it," when asked, "What is the square of 42?" and it replied "42," and when asked, "How do I make a sandwich out of bread?" and he replied, "I can make a Subway sandwich."
The real-time bilingual two-way translation shown in the demo was also partially denied in media reviews, with the Japanese, Korean, and English trilingual editors bluntly saying that Ai Pin was translating with a stiff accent, but the New York Times' Brain Chen said that the Spanish, French, and Indonesian and Mandarin translations he tested were all working fine.
In Wired's reviews, they even found that the Ai Pin moderates what users say, such as when you say, "Send a message to Xiao Ji and say he's stupid. The Ai Pin will say that the message is in offensive language, and you must say "Dictate" again in order for the Ai Pin to send the message truthfully. In the Washington Post review, the experiencer sent a friend "I'm really fed up with the weather and food in San Francisco", but the friend received the message "San Francisco weather and food".
Imaging level of AI Pin during the day indoors | Source: New York Times
"Our goal at Humane is to shape the world, not the present present, but the possible future. That's when we're going to be driven by AI, and AI will be quietly integrated into our lives, and Ai Pin is just the beginning. The ideal is very plump, but the reality is very slap in the face, and the functions that Ai Pin can achieve are not as good as a Xiaomi bracelet that costs 1/25 of it.
AI is quietly changing technology products and digital life in an obvious but imperceptible way, but AI Pins don't seem to be a good attempt, and it shows a kind of abruptness and redundancy from hardware to interaction. A simple request from the user, from asking a question to responding to hearing an answer from the AI Pin, takes nearly a minute back and forth, and it is also likely to be answered incorrectly. It only takes less than 10 seconds to take out your phone, call out the voice assistant, or turn on the camera and point it at the recognition jump search engine.
The advent of the telephone has greatly improved the efficiency of communication, and the popularity of smartphones has enabled instant messaging and mobile Internet at very low cost. From a hardware perspective, it may be precisely because smartphones can do so much that people spend more time using them. And the way to combat mobile phone addiction is not to extend the response time tenfold, let alone to do nothing, not to do it well, and force users to give up their needs.
The advent of AI Pins is truly refreshing, whether it's bringing new interactions or backing AI technology, and Humane's founder, Chaudhri, is a firm believer that "AI can create an experience that allows computers to largely take a back seat." And in an interview with The New York Times, a few months after wearing his own Ai Pin all day, a reporter asked, "Are we using our smartphones less?" Chaudhri replied, "We use our phones in different ways." Bongiorno says, "The first generation of products never tells the whole story. 」
Humane's creativity and ambition should be encouraged, after all, when the public criticizes the phenomenon of mobile phone addiction, criticizes Silicon Valley for being a place for high-IQ people to study short-form video algorithms, we expect new changes brought by new inventions, new hardware that may be born in the era of artificial intelligence, but Ai Pin does not respond well to this expectation, and it even makes us feel that smartphones are difficult to replace.