Humane wants the smartphone in your pocket to disappear. The start-up’s first production, the Ai Pin, is its first step on the road to a diaphanous blend of the real and the digital, a personal AI device that you wear and communicate with through speech and gesture. No screen, no buttons, no apps, no downloads. The public got a sneak preview of the device worn by models at Coperni’s S/S 2024 show in Paris on 29 September 2023, implying this kind of device will eventually become ubiquitous.
‘Pin’ is something of a misnomer, as the tech itself is a chunky badge, resembling a shrunken pair of bathroom scales that uses a magnetic catch to clip onto your clothing. Think of it as a personal digital assistant that has been shrunk to near invisibility, with sophisticated contextual software that ‘elevates your interactions with the world around you’.
In practice, this means interacting with the Ai Pin through speech and the touchpad that dominates the front surface. The device also incorporates an ultra-wide camera, depth and motion sensors, along with a ‘personic’ speaker designed to create a ‘bubble of sound’ – Bluetooth headphone connectivity is also available. All this is powered by a Snapdragon processor running Humane’s new Cosmos operating system.
Aside from speech and touch, the other interaction is via Humane’s Laser Ink Display, a projection system that uses your palm as a screen. How does Humane envisage the Ai Pin working? Many of the functions are intended to operate seamlessly in the background, such as voice search, translation, and even a tool that visually analyses your food to help with your nutrition.
Overall control and data management is undertaken via the Humane.center hub, and the company stresses that privacy is paramount in its strategy, with no always-on function awaiting a ‘wake word’ and a light showing when the device is active. A couple of decades into the smartphone era, and the sages of Silicon Valley are thinking hard as to the shape and form of the next multi-trillion-dollar personal technology. The idea of a portable, personal AI assistant that doesn’t need to be tethered to a smartphone might be someone’s idea of freedom. What will make or break the Ai Pin, however, is how seamless that experience will be.
The past year or so has been dominated by AI, and the way it threatens to redraw our definition of creativity, be it in product design, photography, car design, or architecture and writing itself. Humane has skipped the question of AI-enhanced creativity and gone straight to seeing the tech as a silent, near invisible partner for everyday uses.
The Californian company was founded in 2019 by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, both of whom previously worked at Apple. The journey to the Ai Pin has taken several years, as the team scratch-built a software and hardware platform that was robust, flexible and sufficiently small to represent a real step away from the smartphone. Collaborators include TIDAL, OpenAI, Microsoft and T-Mobile – it’ll be the last’s network that powers the first devices.
Initially, it could well be the world of work that benefits most from integrating the Ai Pin into existing systems, with the hands-off nature of a camera-enabled device promising a functionality akin to Google’s Glass experiment. Now that AI has infiltrated our smartphones and underpins substantial swathes of the nebulous relationship we have with digital assistants, telephone banking, and many, many other human-machine interfaces, is making it even less visible the way forward?
’The first Humane device will allow people to bring AI with them everywhere,’ Chaudhri said earlier this year, and the company is committing itself to ‘a future where AI seamlessly integrates into every aspect of our lives and enhances our daily experiences’. Is it a future based on wants or needs?
Ai Pin is available in three colours, Eclipse, Equinox, and Lunar. The system will be available in the US from November 2023 and starts at $699 with a monthly subscription of $24, including the device, two battery boosters, charge pad, charge case, cloud storage, cable and adapter. For more information, visit Hu.ma.ne
