Humane Inc is an American technology company founded by an American couple, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, who both previously worked at Apple Inc. The startup emerged from stealth mode in 2021. The company developed and designed the Humane AI Pin, which started shipping in April 2024.
In May 2023, the couple’s husband, Chaudhri, revealed the device and demonstrated its features during a TED Talk conference. Three months later, it was showcased at Paris Fashion Week in September. The company announced that their wearable device would be called the “Ai pin” in July 2023, and later in November 2023, the company raised $230 million from notable investors such as Marc Benioff from Salesforce, Sam Altman, Microsoft, SoftBank, Qualcomm, and others. Months later, Humaine announced their partnership with Open AI and Microsoft. By April 2024, the device started shipping.
The Humane AI Pin has received both praise and criticism since its released.
In this article, we will walk you through AI Pin users’ experiences to showcase its standout features, strengths, and weaknesses so that you can make an informed decision on whether Ai Pin is the desirable device for you. Whether you are a tech enthusiast or an avid electronics consumer, this blog post will serve as a guide to the Humane AI Pi
AI Pin Overview
The first thing I want you to do is forget about the smartphone in your pocket for a second. Just ignore it for a minute.
What Is The Humane Ai Pin?
The Humane Ai Pin is a brand new standalone device, and it’s really impressive from the perspective of a far-out futuristic wearable gadget. Like all these amazing gadgets such as Wearable glasses, The Rabbit R1, and the Apple Vision Pro, it’s so exciting that we now have a genuinely new first-generation product like this. I would like to call it a futuristic phone or computer without a screen. This is a standalone device with its own internet connection, SIM card, and phone number. Let’s call it a little Ai assistant. Honestly, this thing does not pair with your phone at all. The idea is that you can talk to it like a person. You can ask questions, and it will answer them, provide you with historical facts, or personalized recommendations. It can help you out with things like brainstorming or remembering things you tell it to remember.
The Humane AI Pin can help you make phone calls, send text messages, and navigate without looking at the screen. It can serve as a real-time translator for over 50 different languages; it does a ton of stuff. It has a lot of sensors packed in there. There is a camera, there are microphones, there are lights, and a small class 2 laser projector. Made with aluminum, the hardware packaging is very solid. And then the magnets that connect everything together make it very strong. The booster, which is the back of the pin, is another battery. So it has its own internal battery. It comes with an extremely well-made and also very reflective charging case. It charges via USB-C ports.
“This Little Ai pin can do a lot of things. It can take pictures, record videos with its camera, predict the weather, stream music, all with just vibes and no screen. Ai pin is a futuristic productivity product that does magical things. It costs over $700 with a $24 monthly subscription. The pricing may seem high, but hold on! We’ll get there. Ai Pin is a genuine product for those who are curious enough and want to know more about the world around them. Ai Pin is pretty impressive at times. But let’s be honest. As a gadget, it is fun, helpful, and sometimes frustrating. And this Pin can frustrate you.”,
Yes, Ai Pin is supposed to boost your productivity, like helping you do things rapidly and accurately. Amazingly, Ai Pin can look up everything around you and describe the surroundings, if you ask it to. You can ask it to give you directions to a specific place, order food in a restaurant, tell you the components of food, help you book a vacation, and all the other things we listed so far. So if these are the only things that AI Pin can do, does it worth being a hardware?
Humane AI Pin Review
Here is the important question reviewers often ask: Why shouldn’t this thing just be an android app? You get it. In part, I do respect the ideas behind these full standalone gadgets. For this one, I think the goal is to make our lives easier, get us off the screen, save time by doing things quickly, and that gives us a little hope for its future. I mean it should be a great achievement.
First of all, this gadget is supposed to answer questions, right? But sometimes, it can’t fulfill that promise, and does almost everything wrong. Some users report that it’s annoying to use. It has a very low battery life, you have to charge it many times a day. It’s also constantly warm, which is another concerning point. Even sometimes it can make you wait for a while for it to cool down because of the heat problem.
It’s not dismissing, the AI Pin is a very impressive hardware with amazing features. But it’s just bad now.
This device is not good to use because it has many flaws. It fails to perform basic tasks accurately. The Pin cannot set the timer or an alarm. Its photos and videos look very poor. While it has a projector for hands-on control of options and navigation, it’s not easily readable and the hands aren’t flat enough to represent the screen well. The brightness is not sufficient outdoors and decreases the farther from your hand. Also, it requires you to hold your hand up in front of the projector while using it, which may be challenging. With a phone, you have more flexibility as you can easily move your hand up and down. Imagine needing to control the device with your hand up for 10 to 15 minutes… Despite its impressive features, it may not be very helpful.
Also, as of right now, they do not have any apps available, no connections. There is no Uber connection, no Spotify access, no Gmail, no WhatsApp; you can’t buy on Amazon. None of that stuff. If you want to do any of those things, you have to do them on your phone.
Let’s face it. Almost everything this pin can basically do, your phone can do better in terms of quality, simplicity, and speed. I mean smartphones can take better pictures, high-quality videos, and you can easily frame things with your smartphone. Just simple. You can make phone calls, send text or voice messages, share files, and so on. You can have full control on your smartphone rather than the AI pin. With your phone, you can use any kind of software app you need. In fact, you can’t watch videos, play video games in the palm of your hand for 30 minutes or hours keeping your hand up.
“The funny thing about these AI-rooted gadgets is that there are a lot of things you can’t do with them. You still have to carry your phone around with you, so you end up with two devices to manage. They’re built from the ground up with operating systems entirely based on AI. They give you the ability to talk to them with voice commands like a human, process information, give you answers, and perform tasks quickly. So, they’re pretty useful. We can’t deny the added value, can we? Just being able to talk to something like that in your natural language and have it understand and perform tasks is quite impressive.
However, it could be done differently. Dave2D pointed out that if all the device can do is answer questions and perform tasks based on AI, why can’t it just be an app?”
“Maybe they have a high futuristic vision of their product, or they may want it to become a very strong standalone device in the future. But right now, they don’t get it right.
Okay, now it’s the pricing. Even if your phone costs more than $700, the $24 monthly subscription can be hugely expensive in the long run. The cost of $700 with a $24 subscription to buy something which will only do things your phone can also do or less; Not great!
Here is a comment shared under The Verge post: ‘The Humane Ai Pin worked better than I expected – until it didn’t.’ ‘I still don’t understand why they need to sell a piece of tech for this to work. If all the processing is done off-device, just have it work really well with an Android or iPhone.’
This is the secret: Humane wants your attention. If they made just an app, who would really care about it? Now they bring it to the table. So you can see the next Apple. With $230 million already raised and their partnerships with OpenAI and Microsoft they are good to go. Let’s give them some time.
Whatever the future of AI technology holds or whatever we can expect in mobile computing, we can’t exactly believe now that it’s the Humane AI Pin as we experienced. “While these devices hinted at what intelligent products could offer us in the future, they had not delivered it yet,” said Francisco Jeronimo, analyst at market research firm IDC. So better you buy it based on what it can do for you today and not what it will do tomorrow. Introducing The Rabbit R1 And Its perspectives.
