The first users of Ai Pin got their new toys.
Since its debut at MWC 2024 (Mobile World Congress), the AI Pin, which claims to be the "iPhone in the AI era", has finally been shipped, and the foreign media who got started for the first time have also experienced this "wonderful" product in an all-round way with great enthusiasm and curiosity.
Everyone has a high level of unanimous evaluation of AI Pin:
- The equipment is well-made, worthy of the work of a former Apple engineer;
- It looks smaller than in the picture, it is easy to wear, and there are multiple modules to choose from;
- Good quality of photography;
- Real-time translation is very easy to use, and the translation is quite accurate.
But if you're wondering if Ai Pin is worth buying, everyone will wake you up with a loud voice: NO
过于简陋，没多大用处。 ——WIRED
The only thing I can really rely on Ai Pin to do is tell me the time. ——The Verge
The interaction, which should have been a bright spot, became the biggest flaw
I have to admit that Humane (the parent company of Ai Pin) is trying to create a new world that subverts traditional human-computer interaction.
Whether it was last year's online conference or this year's live demonstration at MWC, the four core interaction methods of Ai Pin—"voice," "touch," "gesture," and "projection," were really cool, and no one had dared to make such a bold and radical attempt on a consumer-grade product.
Ai Pin did it, it was in the limelight, and it went wrong.
Among them, the most criticized is "gesture interaction", which is one of the most impressive features in the promotional video, and works in conjunction with the projection function.
Gesture navigation is supposed to be very smart, and it needs to accurately recognize the user's gestures, such as the air gesture on the Huawei Mate series, you can see changes in actions such as flipping up, flipping down, and clenching your fist.
The AI PIN works similarly to hand recognition, but it's a bit too sensitive, even a little sensitive. The device projects content so that the hand can only move within a certain range, and the spacing between the screen options is small, and the amplitude of the hand is slightly larger, so it is easy to skip the target option and click to the side.
If you want to be as skillful as the Humane staff showed on the spot, and even a little bit of strategizing, you need to master the amplitude and sense of proportion of the gestures, much like the feeling of putting a ping pong ball on a racket to keep your balance and not falling off.
Engadget reacted that even if you are accustomed to this kind of "micro-manipulation" and can easily point and hit, when the palm of the hand shakes back and forth, it will cause the AI PIN to shake back and forth, and the laser projection will also sway with it.
On average, it takes about five seconds to enter a four-digit PIN to unlock your device.
You can train to form interactive muscle memory, but the projected content will cause you another problem: the laser ink screen, which is a bit low.
Another groundbreaking technology at Humane is the laser ink display, which projects green light into the palm of the user's hand, and is the basis for gesture interaction.
The advantage of it is that it can interact with the hand, but the most troublesome thing is that it can only interact with the hand. Lasers can only be projected in the palm of the hand, not on a table or wall.
Scrolling through Instagram with your phone can be tiring, but at least you can put it on your desk and keep browsing.
But on the AI Pin, if your arm isn't raised, you can't see anything.
The second defect of the laser ink screen is that the projection distance is fixed, and the user should keep the body and palm as still as possible, and try the position of the palm many times to get the best projection effect. It's all going to come back every time you re-wear it.
And, even if you can really solve the above problems with training, how will you deal with the problem of showing too little content?
In fact, Ai Pin projects a relatively small canvas, and Engadget reporters have measured that they can see about 7 lines of text each time, and each line has about 1~3 words.
This means that when reading long text, the user must hold their hand up for longer until the notification rolls to the bottom.
What's even more interesting is that this "smaller" projection screen is relative, and is not mentioned in WIRED's reporter Julian's article because she has larger hands.
The last flaw regarding the projection screen appears in almost all review articles: it cannot be used in sunlight.
- The laser projection is not bright enough to beat the sun. Prior to this review, Ai Pin had only been publicly demonstrated in darker environments such as the TED Talk stage and indoor conference booths, so how well the laser projection would perform in direct sunlight was the biggest question that remained unanswered. ——ZDNET
- When you're in the sun, the projector is basically unreadable. —The Washington Post
- Walk out and you'll have a hard time reading faint projections. Even on a rainy day in New York, I could barely read the words on my hand. 」——Engadget
- 除非你在强光下，它就几乎看不见了。 」——The Verge
I don't know how Humane's product managers would feel when they saw this feedback, at least from what we know about the AI Pin, it's probably a "smart product" that is used more frequently outdoors, but for various reasons, it can't work outside the door.
In the promotion of AI Pin, screen removal is a core concept, but at present, it seems that it is still in the stage of "such as go" - neither the present nor the future.
Ai Pin, which is not very smart, makes you a little silly too
Humane defines AI Pins as people's "second brains" to achieve a smartphone-like experience through innovative hardware interactions with people and their surroundings.
However, after mass production, Ai PIN does not have a solid label for smart devices, and even looks like a semi-finished product.
David Pierce of The Verge found that while the Ai Pin could make notes with his voice and create to-do lists, it couldn't set alarms or timers, or add events to a calendar.
= The problem with so many voice assistants is that they can't do much, and AI Pins can do even less.
It's funny that the AI Pin, which was supposed to be a big player in object recognition, fell big in everyone's hands.
WIRED's correspondent Julian Chokkattu reacted that Ai Pin's accuracy is up for measure: it incorrectly judged "high-fructose corn syrup" as a sweetener banned by California, but none of the four sweeteners banned by California last year was high-fructose corn syrup.
And the recognition of street scenes often does not match the facts. Although the AI PIN has a built-in GPS chip, it often goes unresponsive when asked for a nearby restaurant location, and even if you stand in front of a landmark building and ask, "Where is this?" it is likely to give the wrong answer.
Sometimes he even hallucinates. An Inverse reporter used an Ai Pin to describe the following footage:
Ai Pin's answer:
A man sits on a gray chair with a green broom on the table to the right. He wears a red, white, and black plaid shirt, blue jeans, and brown shoes. He looked down at the phone in his hand. There was a white piece of paper on the round table to his right. There is a gray iMac computer on a white table in the background. There are also two white chairs in the background.
There is no black on the man's shirt in the picture, and there is only a white chair in the background.
Reaction speed is another big deduction for AI Pin, and the corresponding speed is crucial to whether AI can resonate with consumers, and many times the "intelligence" in our minds often comes from instant answers, so as to reflect the omniscience and omniscience of AI.
But for some reason, Ai Pin actually made a compromise on response speed.
Truth be told, the voice interaction enabled by the Ai Pin has greatly shortened the process of people retrieving information: a finger touches a question, and an answer is waited. This kind of "one-step" simple search is exactly what the AI era wants to have as a de-app, de-third-party, and AIGC chat box, which is not only a Google search box, but also a search bar for station B, and an entrance to Taobao's map recognition.
But even questions like "What's the weather like today?" don't even require LLM involvement, Ai Pins make you wait more than 6 seconds.
These problems may come from large model hallucinations, server problems, etc., although they will be improved in the future, but for a product that wants to go to the masses, this will only become a reason for users not to pay, and it will also make artificial intelligence once again ridiculed as "artificial imbecile".
You should only buy the current product, not the future product they promised.
The uncleverness of the AI Pin, combined with the advanced way of interaction, will also make you a "stupid conspicuous bag" when you use it outdoors.
When a social message arrives, you'll need to place your hand in the right place, wave your palm to navigate the page, and even make some gestures that resemble a stamp.
When you want to know about your destination, you need to be clear in the crowd, and you have to repeat it a few times if the network is bad or the equipment is in jeopardy.
Humane aspired to bring the future of devices early to the present with AI Pins, but instead of successfully integrating the intelligent experiences of previous products, they messed up the present.
重走 Google 死胡同
Ironically, buying a $699 device with phone-like features and paying for a $24 monthly humanized subscription plan with the aim of reducing the use of the phone.
All in all, Ai Pin's current impression is that it costs money to suffer.
The Verge has a 4/10 rating for Ai Pins and a 5/10 rating for Engadget, and CNET doesn't even call their reviews "reviews" because they feel like Ai Pins aren't done yet.
It has almost all feature phones, so it doesn't cost extra money, and it doesn't have experience phones, and it's even better.
So under the mutual offset, it is not a good deal to buy an ink screen that is invisible in the sun for 699 US dollars (about 5058 yuan), an interactive device with strict posture, a smart screen recognition software that is unresponsive, and a chest warmer that will get hot after a while.
The above is still the "technical issue" encountered without mentioning the privacy and security controversy of AI PINs. Smartphones have been around for more than 10 years and are still challenged by these topics today.
As a result, it may be months or even years before the AI Pin truly becomes the "ambient computing wearable" that Humane hopes it is, and the current AI Pin is "just a party topic".
In fact, Humane has a "king-bombed" start:
- The market debut of AI Pin comes at a time when the trough of the smartphone boom and the crest of the AI boom converge;
- The company's founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, worked at Apple and also worked on the original iPhone;
- The company's largest shareholder is Sam Altman, the father of ChatGPT;
- It was selected as the "2023 Invention of the Year" by Time before it was officially released.
AI Pin has almost all the elements of success, caught up with the times, and has been favored by investors in the wind, with the world's top designers and advanced product concepts, but when this "genius" officially came to us, why did it become so bad?
At Google I/O 2012, Google Glass was officially announced.
Since its launch, Google Glass has been defined as a product that will shape the direction of technology over the next decade.
It can display information such as weather, messages, phone calls, etc., and can be used to take photos, record videos, navigate, or call Google Assistant to answer your questions.
三年后，Google Glass 正式宣告停产。
Concerns about device privacy, high prices, and limitations in real-world use made Google Glass not widely available, and the tech dream became a pipe dream.
When people come out of the excitement and re-examine this "genius boy" rationally, it is not difficult to find that any smartphone that is several times cheaper than him can fully meet its functions, in contrast, the defects of Google Glass are also instantly apparent: scarce functions, weak performance, exaggerated shape, and poor battery life.
Ai Pins tick all the boxes, and Humane is just walking into the same dead end that Google used to be.
Later, according to foreign media reports, the Google X team and marketing team have long known that Google Glass is still a semi-finished product, and there are still many loopholes and problems to be solved, which is not suitable for public exposure.
We don't know if Humane knows all of this, but as soon as they were born, they put AI Pins in a high position.
The idea is too far ahead of its time, to liberate people from the screen and return to their current lives, to obsessively cancel local apps, no matter how much people need these software today, and even to release the rhetoric of "being the iPhone of the AI era".
However, the moment people get the AI Pin, it is not difficult to find that the "thunder" of these titles and definitions is very large, but the "raindrops" that give the user experience are very small, which is no different from Google Glass, which almost started the trend of technology for 10 years.
However, compared to Google Glass, which has become history, Ai Pin still has hope.
It looks pleasing, inherits the excellent genes of Apple's design, and with the blessing of the large model, practical features such as real-time translation have received good reviews, and more importantly, the Humane team has a relatively clear positioning of its own products.
After reading the full article, you may notice that the "i" of Ai Pin is not capitalized, and founder Bongiorno explains, "This shows that we are in the early stages of artificial intelligence. Obviously, Ai Pin still has a long way to go. 」
Maybe one day in the future, Ai Pin will be redefined, but after reading the feedback of the first users, it feels like this future is still far away.