On a recent afternoon, I held a bagel in front of me and said, “Look and tell me if this is healthy.”
A monotone voice responded that the bagel was unhealthy because it was high in carbohydrates, which could contribute to weight gain.
I didn’t talk to a tech guy who was obsessed with the ketogenic diet. This was the Ai Pin, a small $700 computer with a virtual assistant that collects data from OpenAI (the research company behind the ChatGPT chatbot), Google, Microsoft and others to answer questions and complete tasks.
The pin is shaped like a lapel pin which may be a reference to ‘Star Trek’. It is attached to your clothing with magnets and should relieve you of tasks that you would normally do with a smartphone, such as taking notes, searching the internet and taking photos. Instead of a screen, the pin shines a green laser onto your hand to display text. The device includes a camera, speaker and cellular connection.
The new design of the Ai Pin, created by the startup Humane, caused a stir when it was unveiled late last year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and companies like Microsoft and Salesforce have made a bold bet — with $240 million in funding for Humane — that artificially intelligent hardware like the Ai Pin will be the next big thing after the smartphone. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train chatbots.)
Humane said the goal of the Ai Pin was to provide technology that allows people to avoid screens and maintain eye contact.
I loved the chic aesthetic and concept of the pin. It was occasionally useful, such as when it suggested items to pack for my recent trip to Hawaii. But when I wore it for two weeks, it showed noticeable flaws. Often the responses were unpleasant, as with the bagel, or wrong, as when it was said that the square root of 49 was 49. Also, the Times photoshoot of the Ai Pin ended prematurely when the device overheated and shut down.
I wouldn’t pay $700 for this pin, let alone the $24 per month plan required to use the data services, including the T-Mobile cellular plan. But consider my curiosity.
Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, the husband-and-wife founders of Humane, who worked at Apple, said updates issued through the servers would fix many of the issues I had encountered, including heat issues and bad math.
“It’s a journey and we’re just getting started,” Bongiorno said. “The first draft is never the entirety of the vision.”
Here’s how my experience wearing the Ai Pin went.
To work
Since the Ai Pin has no screen, users set up their accounts and other settings on Humane’s website. To unlock the device with a passcode, extend your hand to project a green laser onto your palm. Pulling your hand out increases the number, while pulling it in decreases the number. You select each number by pinching two fingers of the same hand.
The laser can be used to adjust other settings, such as connecting to a Wi-Fi network, and can show a text transcription of the virtual assistant’s responses. Humane said the laser should not be used for more than nine minutes, but for me it lasted about three minutes before the Ai Pin complained that it was too hot and turned off.
A virtual assistant
In addition to unlocking the pin with the laser, you mainly operate the Ai Pin with finger taps and your voice. The benefit of pinning a virtual assistant to my shirt became apparent as I walked around and thought about the many things I had to do.
With one finger on the Ai Pin, I could summon the assistant and ask it to add tasks to my to-do list. This feature manifested itself when I was packing for my vacation to Hawaii and added items to my packing list, including T-shirts and swim trunks. When I asked the pin to suggest other items to pack for my trip there, he recommended a hat, sunscreen, and other relevant items. Very cool.
However, in some other situations the Ai Pin was less useful. While in Hawaii this month, I had trouble remembering the name of a food truck near my hotel that served loco moco, so I asked the assistant to look it up for me. It said no such food truck could be found, so I searched on my phone instead.
A language interpreter
A key feature of the Ai Pin is its ability to translate a conversation into another language in real time. With one finger on the pin, I could set a language I wanted to translate to, such as Mandarin. When I held two fingers on the pin and said a sentence in English, the Ai Pin said it in Mandarin, and vice versa.
I tested this with several other languages, including Spanish, French and Indonesian. I confirmed that the interpreter was usually right, but when converting from English to Mandarin he mistranslated “good morning” into “da jia hao,” which means “hello everyone.”
Would you watch that?
Humane is adding a feature called Vision on the Ai Pin, which has been labeled “beta” to indicate that it is not yet completed. The device uses its camera and AI to analyze your environment and provide information about what you are looking at. This led to my quirky experience with a bagel, which only got weirder the more questions I asked.
I asked the pin how to make the bagel tastier, and he then explained how to make bagels from scratch. Finally, I asked the pin to come up with suggestions for sandwiches that could be made with the bagel. It resulted in a long list of ideas, including chickpea salad sandwiches, Sloppy Joes and cucumber sandwiches with green chutney.
On holiday I visited a botanical garden and asked the pin to identify a flower. “The flower is yellow with red stripes on the inside,” the pin says. That was true, but it didn’t answer my question.
“It’s a Solandra maxima,” my wife said. She had taken a photo of the flower with her phone and uploaded it to a Google Images search. I felt sheepish.
Humane said it was continuously working to improve the Vision feature.
The phone stuff
Like a smartphone, the Ai Pin has its own phone number and mobile data connection for making calls and playing music, and the camera can be used to take photos and videos.
Here the Ai Pin mainly underperformed. For something designed to help you spend less time on your phone, it doesn’t come any better than a smartphone for all of these tasks. Photos and videos taken with the camera look poorly lit and blurry. To make a call you can ask the assistant to call someone from your address book, but to call a new number you dictate the digits. For music, the device currently only works with Tidal, an unpopular music streaming service.
Bongiorno said the Ai Pin let her take more candid photos without a screen getting in the way. But for me this was a disadvantage. Without a viewfinder, photos looked poorly framed.
In short
While the Ai Pin was useful and impressive at times, it was often wrong, useless, or inefficient in driving me back to my phone.
Gary Marcus, an AI entrepreneur, said the mistakes the Ai Pin made, such as with the bagel, were the result of so-called hallucinations, AI’s tendency to guess and make things up when it can’t find the right answer. That’s a problem that remains unsolved in many AI technologies, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Bongiorno acknowledged that hallucinations occurred with Gemini, the technology behind the Ai Pin’s Vision feature. She added that the technology would improve quickly thanks to user feedback and that the company had already refined the pin’s response to bagels.
Marcus said that no company yet has AI technology advanced enough to allow a virtual assistant to answer questions reliably.
“It’s almost like a broken watch being right twice a day,” he said. “Some of the time it’s right, but you don’t know what part of the time, and that greatly diminishes its value.”
Yet there is a kernel of an idea worth preserving. I liked having an assistant on my shirt when it was actually useful. I’m pinning my hopes on future versions of the product – perhaps a cheaper one without the camera and laser.