At any given time, there are between five and eight phones on my desk. And by “my office,” I mean any combination of tables and counters in my house. So when I saw the Humane AI Pin reviews start pouring in last week, I did what any logical person would do: grabbed the nearest phone and tried to turn it into my own AI wearable.
Humane would like you to believe that its AI Pin represents consumer technology at its peak. The reviews and pin guts say otherwise: it uses a Snapdragon processor from four years ago and seems to work a customized version of Android 12.
“It’s a mid-range Android phone! I declared during our next team meeting, waving a mid-range Android phone for effect. “You can just download Gemini and stick this on your shirt!” ” Simple. Banal. Give me 10 minutes and I’ll have a more powerful AI gadget, I said.
The material is difficult, y’all.
Ideally, I wanted an outward-facing camera and a decent voice assistant that I could use hands-free. An iPhone in a shirt pocket This was an intriguing but unsustainable solution because a) none of my shirts have pockets, and b) Siri just isn’t that smart. So, my first prototype was a Motorola Razr Plus attached to the neckline of my shirt. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work, but for reasons I hadn’t anticipated.
First of all, you cannot download Gemini from the Play Store on a foldable phone. This was news to me. But even after downloading it and setting it as my default assistant, I ran into another obstacle: It’s really difficult to use a voice assistant from the cover screen of a flip phone. The Razr wants you to open the phone before you can do anything other than get its attention with “Hey Google.”
Running Gemini in Chrome on the cover screen actually got me closer to what I was looking for. But trying to press buttons on the screen to trigger the assistant didn’t work very well, and neither did using Google Lens out of the corner of my eye. Additionally, Gemini misinterpreted the word “recycle” on a tube of toothpaste as “becicle,” which, he confidently told me, was an old word for glasses. It’s not!
Prototype two was the same Razr flip phone running ChatGPT in talk mode on the cover screen. This meant the app was constantly running and listening, so it wasn’t practical. But I gave it a try anyway, and it was a strange experience talking to an AI chatbot that I couldn’t see.
I want an AI that can do things for me, not just think about stir-fry ingredients
ChatGPT is a good conversationalist, but we ran out of topics to talk about pretty quickly once I exhausted my chatbot credentials: dinner recipes and plant care tips. I want an AI that can do things for me, not just think about stir fry ingredients.
I abandoned the foldable concept and instead bought a Pixel 8 and a Pixel Watch 2. I set Gemini as the default assistant on the phone and figured that would apply to the watch as well. Fake. However, I had one card left to play: a good old pair of wireless headphones. Life on the cutting edge, baby.
But you know what? It kind of worked. I had to leave Gemini open and running on my phone because Google doesn’t fully support Gemini Assistant on headphones. But I took a picture of a blue apron recipe I was making for dinner, told Gemini to remember it, and left my phone on the counter. As I moved around the kitchen, I asked Gemini questions that I would normally have to glance at the recipe to answer, like “How long should I roast vegetables?” » and “How to prepare fish?” This gave me the correct answers every time.
What was more impressive was that I could ask him tangential questions. It helped me use pantry ingredients to recreate a seasoning blend I didn’t have on hand. I asked why the recipe might have me split the sauce into two portions, and this gave me a plausible answer. And it did something the Humane pin can’t do yet: set a timer.
It wasn’t perfect. First, I had to unplug the Google Home puck sitting on the counter because it kept trying to get in the way. Gemini also told me it couldn’t play an album on Spotify, which is what this Google Home speaker does for the most part. of a decade. The watch proved useful, at least for that.
What started as a crazy stunt convinced me of two things: I really think we’re going to use AI to do more things in the future, and also, the future of AI gadgets is only for phones . It’s the phones!
I love gadgets, but guys, I lived through the days when camera manufacturers were trying to convince us that we should all carry a point-and-shoot camera and our phones everywhere. Phones won. The phones already feature powerful processors, decent heat dissipation, and sophisticated wireless connectivity. An AI gadget that works independently of your phone should understand all of this.
And you know what looks a lot less ridiculous than a pin with a laser on its chest? Headphones. People happily wear them all day these days. And the wacky factor really matters when it comes to wearables. I struggle to see how a separate gadget can beat the humble phone plus a pair of headphones or something like the Meta Ray Bans. Maybe there is room in our lives and pockets for dedicated AI hardware – the gadget lover in me is all for it. But I think it’s more likely that we have all the ingredients we need to make great AI hardware right in front of us.