On a recent afternoon, I held a bagel in front of me and said: “Look and tell me if it’s healthy.”
A monotone voice replied that the bagel was unhealthy because it was high in carbohydrates, which could contribute to weight gain.
I’m not talking to a tech bro obsessed with the ketogenic diet. It’s the Ai Pin, a $700 tiny computer that features a virtual assistant that pulls data from OpenAI (the research firm behind the ChatGPT chatbot), Google, Microsoft and others to answer questions and perform tasks task.
Shaped like a lapel pin that might be a throwback to “Star Trek,” it attaches to your clothing with magnets and is supposed to offload tasks you’d normally do with a smartphone, like taking notes, searching the web and taking pictures. Instead of a screen, the pin shines a green laser on your hand to display text. The device includes a camera, speaker and cellular connectivity.
Ai Pin’s novel design, created by start-up Humane, generated buzz when it was unveiled late last year. Companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce have placed a bold bet — to the tune of $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 says its goal with the Ai Pin is to offer technology that helps people avoid screens and maintain eye contact.
I loved the chic aesthetic and concept of the pin. Occasionally it helps, like when it suggested items to pack for my recent trip to Hawaii. But as I wore it for two weeks, it showed glaring flaws. Often, its responses are off-putting, as in the bagel, or wrong, as when it said the square root of 49 is 49. Also, The Times photo shoot of Ai Pin ended early when it overheated and shut down the device is down.
I wouldn’t pay $700 for this pin — let alone the $24-a-month subscription required to use its data services, including its T-Mobile cellular plan. But consider my curiosity piqued.
Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, the founders of the couple Humane, who worked at Apple, said that updates provided through its servers will address many of the glitches I experienced, including issues with heat and bad math.
“It’s a journey, and we’re just at the beginning,” said Ms. Good morning. “The first version is never the entirety of the vision.”
This was my experience wearing Ai Pin.
Starting
Since Ai Pin is screenless, users set up their accounts and other settings on the Humane website. To unlock the device with a passcode, hold out your hand to project a green laser into your palm. Pulling your hand out increases the number while pulling it in decreases it, and you select each digit by pinching two fingers on the same hand.
The laser can be used to tweak other settings, such as connecting to a Wi-Fi network, and it can display a text transcription of the virtual assistant’s answers. Humane says the laser is intended to be used for no more than nine minutes, but for me, it lasted about three before the Ai Pin complained that it was too hot and shut down.
A Virtual Assistant
Beyond unlocking the pin with a laser, you can further control the Ai Pin by tapping your fingers and voice. The advantage of pinning a virtual assistant to my shirt became clear when I was moving and thinking about the many things I had to do.
With one finger held on the Ai Pin, I can summon the assistant and ask it to add tasks to my to-do list. This feature came to light when I was packing for my Hawaii vacation 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, it recommended a hat, sunscreen and other related items. Very cool.
However, Ai Pin is less helpful in some other situations. When I was in Hawaii last week, 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 there was no such food truck to be found, leading me to search on my phone instead.
A Language Translator
An important feature in Ai Pin is the ability to translate a conversation into another language in real time. With one finger held on the pin, I can set a language to translate, such as Mandarin. When I put two fingers down on the pin and say a phrase in English, Ai Pin says it in Mandarin, and vice versa.
I tried it in several other languages, including Spanish, French and Indonesian. I confirmed that the interpreter was mostly correct, although when converting English to Mandarin, it mistranslated “good morning” to “da jia hao,” which means “hello, everyone.”
Will you look at that?
Humane includes a feature called Vision on the Ai Pin, which is labeled “beta” as a sign that it’s not finished yet. The device uses its camera and AI to scan your surroundings and provide information about what you’re looking at. This led to my strange experience with a bagel, which got even stranger the more I asked.
I asked the pin how to make a bagel tastier, and it proceeded to explain how to make bagels from scratch. Eventually, I asked the pin for suggestions for sandwiches that could be made with the bagel. It generated a long list of ideas, including chickpea salad sandwiches, sloppy Joes and cucumber sandwiches with green chutney.
On vacation, I visited a botanical garden and asked the pin to identify a flower. “The flower is yellow with a red stripe inside,” the pin said. This is correct, but it doesn’t answer my question.
“It’s a Solandra maxima,” said my husband. He took a photo of the flower with his phone and uploaded it to a Google Images search. I felt ashamed.
Humane says it’s constantly working to improve the Vision feature.
The Phone Thing
Just like a smartphone, the Ai Pin has its own phone number and cellular data connection to make phone calls and play music, and its camera can be used to shoot photos and videos.
This is where Ai Pin especially fails to deliver. For something designed to make you spend less time on your phone, it’s not better than a smartphone at any of those tasks. Photos and videos taken with the camera look blurry and blurry. To make a phone call, you can ask the assistant to call someone in your address book, but to dial a new number, you dictate the digits. For music, the device currently only works with Tidal, an unpopular music streaming service.
said Ms. Bongiorno that the Ai Pin let him take more candid photos without the screen blocking. But for me, it’s a loss. Without a viewfinder, photos look poorly framed.
Bottom Line
While Ai Pin is occasionally useful and awesome, it’s just wrong, unhelpful or not enough time to get me back on my phone.
Gary Marcus, an AI entrepreneur, says that mistakes made by Ai Pin, like the bagel, are the result of so-called hallucinations, the AI’s tendency to guess and do things when it can’t find the right one. answer. That’s a problem that remains unsolved in many AI technologies including Google’s ChatGPT and Gemini.
Ms. recognized Bongiorno that hallucinations happen in Gemini, the technology behind Ai Pin’s Vision feature. He added that the technology can be improved quickly with user feedback and that the company has already refined the reaction of the pin on bagels.
Mr. Marcus says no company yet has AI technology sophisticated enough to trust a virtual assistant to answer questions.
“It’s almost like a broken clock that ticks twice a day,” he said. “It’s right sometimes, but you don’t know which part of the time, and that greatly devalues it.”
However there is a kernel of an idea worth preserving. I liked having a helper in my shirt when it really helped. I’ll put my hopes on future iterations of the product — maybe a cheaper one without the camera and laser.
