Thoughts on the hu.ma.ne AI Pin
By Lucas Fernandes Aguiar
I watched the presentation by hu.ma.ne founder earlier in the week at TED in May, and I thought the device, the Ai Pin, was really different from what we have, read smartphones. What is the use of something without a screen? Then I remembered that people used to have Pagers, but even then, Pagers had a screen with the number to call back. But I digress.
What really made me think was watching their launch video yesterday. We already know by now that not all the information used was accurate. There were less nuts that what the AI said and the eclipse in 2024 will be better viewed thrown North America, rather than Australia. But apart from the AI hallucinations that everybody has already experienced using any AI assistant, the point of the device for me has been made.
Impressions
For people that have a smart home or use voice commands with their phone or other devices, having an assistant a tap away is really convenient. Not having to reach for the phone to check for information is nice, and also you will not have a problem with the microphone on the phone not picking up your command, something that I find really frustrating.
Another cool use that I see happening is for people that do fitness activities outdoor, such as running, cycling, hiking. The possibility to hot swap batteries is really useful if you’re going to a place that doesn’t have electricity available. But, a possible problem could be that the battery is not really good. They didn’t even mentioned it in the presentation so not a good sign.
The camera looked really good but nobody really reviewed to say if it is any good or not. Another problem that I saw is that they are trying to tie too much the device to the subscription of the services. I don’t want my photos and videos to be synced to their cloud storage, I would rather prefer to sync to my OneDrive account as I already do for my other devices. Another thing is the fact that apparently next to no processing will be done on the device, everything will come from the servers, which is understandable/sign that it is not mature enough. It would be a lot cooler if the device had a chip that processed everything at the chip, not depending at all on the signal strength or data plans. If this device plans to substitute smartphone, as it was implied, it should have a way to make contactless payments, but this was not mentioned.
Overall, the device is really interesting but the functionality of the hardware cannot be dependent on software, updates, signal strength. If the buyer decides to not pay anymore for the subscriptions, the devices turns into a brick, completely unusable. It is far a better proposition to have a small device, with the same size as the AI Pin, but that is a standalone device, not depending on data plans. It looks to me that in the future there will be different AI providers, one being from OpenAI/Microsoft, another from Apple, from Google, from Meta, from Amazon and etc. So having a device, like a smartphone, were it can access any of the available AI services would be a far better choice. Since the founders are from Apple, they are seemingly trying to replicate their modus operandi in trying to create a closed walled garden, but people are already very aware of. I mean, why pick this ecosystem from hu.ma.ne? There needs to be a lot more things for it to be that compelling.
Future of the technology
To wrap this up, I did a little digging into what was the number of iPods sold for the first 3 years. It was launched at the end of 2001 and sold 115.000 devices. In 2002 and 2003, the number of devices sold went to 600.000 and more than 2.000.000. So, the number of devices ready to be sold by hu.ma.ne seems to be well in accordance to a new product. But, there are caveats to the comparison, the main one the the subscription part. We will have to see if people are really into buying a completely new device and pay subscription to make it useful.
You can reach out to contact me about this or other topics at my email lucas.fernandes.df@gmail.com.