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 wasn’t talking to a techie bro who was obsessed with the ketogenic diet. That was Ai Pin, a tiny $700 computer that has a virtual assistant that pulls data from OpenAI (the research company behind the ChatGPT chatbot), Google, Microsoft and others to answer questions and perform tasks .
Shaped like a pin that might be a throwback to “Star Trek,” it attaches to your clothes with magnets and is supposed to offload tasks you’d normally do with a smartphone, like taking notes, searching the web and taking photos. Instead of a screen, the pin shines a green laser at your hand to show text. The device includes a camera, speaker and cellular connection.
Ai Pin’s new design, created by start-up Humane, caused a stir when it was unveiled late last year. Companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce have made a bold bet — to the tune of $240 million in funding for Humane — that artificially intelligent hardware like the Ai Pin will become 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 its goal with Ai Pin was to provide technology that would help people avoid screens and maintain eye contact.
I loved the chic aesthetic and the pin concept. Occasionally it was helpful, like when it suggested items to pack for my recent trip to Hawaii. But as I wore it for two weeks, it was glaringly flawed. Often, his answers were off-putting, like with the bagel, or wrong, like when he said the square root of 49 was 49. Also, Ai Pin’s photo shoot by the Times ended prematurely when the device overheated and shut down.
I wouldn’t pay $700 for that pin — let alone the $24-a-month subscription required to use its data services, including the T-Mobile cell phone plan. But consider my curiosity piqued.
Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, founders of Humane, who used to work at Apple, said updates issued through its servers would address many of the glitches I’d encountered, including heat issues and bad math.
“It’s a journey and we’re just at the beginning,” Ms Bongiorno said. “The first version is never the whole vision.”
Here’s how my Ai Pin experience went.
Getting started
Since Ai Pin doesn’t have a 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, pulling it in decreases it, and you select each digit by pinching two fingers on the same hand.
The laser can be used to adjust other settings, such as connecting to a Wi-Fi network, and can display a textual transcript of the virtual assistant’s responses. Humane said the laser was meant to be used for no more than nine minutes, but for me, it lasted about three before the Ai Pin complained it was too hot and shut down.
A virtual assistant
Aside from unlocking the pin with the laser, you’ll be controlling the Ai Pin mostly with your fingers and your voice. The benefit of having a virtual assistant pinned to my shirt became clear when I was driving around and thinking about the many things I had to do.
With one finger pressed on the Ai Pin, I could call the assistant and ask it to add tasks to my to-do list. This feature shined when I was packing for my Hawaii vacation and adding items to my packing list like t-shirts and swimsuits. When I asked the pin to recommend other items to pack for my trip there, she recommended a hat, sunscreen, and other related items. Very cool.
However, Ai Pin was less useful in some other situations. When I was in Hawaii last week, I was having trouble remembering the name of a food truck near my hotel that serves loco moco, so I asked the assistant to look it up for me. He said no such food truck could be found, which made me look on my phone.
Language Interpreter
An important feature in Ai Pin is the ability to translate a conversation into another language in real time. With one finger pressed on the pin, I could set a language to translate, such as Mandarin. When I held two fingers down on the pin and spoke a phrase in English, Ai Pin spoke 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 correct, although with the English to Mandarin conversion, it mistranslated “good morning” to “da jia hao”, which means “hello everyone”.
Would you look at this?
Humane includes a feature called Vision on the Ai Pin, which is marked “beta” to signify that it’s not finished. The device uses the camera and AI to analyze your environment and provide information about what you’re looking at. This is what led to my peculiar experience with a bagel, which got weirder when I asked more questions.
I asked the pin how to make the bagel tastier and she explained how to make bagels from scratch. Finally, I asked the pin for suggestions of sandwiches that could be made with the bagel. He created 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 red stripes inside,” said the pin. That was correct, but it didn’t answer my question.
“It’s a Solandra maxima,” said my wife. She had taken a photo of the flower with her phone and uploaded it to a Google Images search. I felt like sheep.
Humane said it was constantly working to improve the Vision feature.
The Phone Stuff
Similar to a smartphone, Ai Pin has its own phone number and mobile data connection to make phone calls and play music, while its camera can be used to take photos and videos.
This is where Ai Pin was particularly sub-distributed. For something designed to make you spend less time on your phone, it’s no better than a smartphone at any of these tasks. Photos and videos taken with the camera appear poorly lit and blurry. To make a phone call, you can ask Assistant to call someone in 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.
Ms Bongiorno said the Ai Pin allowed her to take more candid photos without blocking the screen. But for me, that was a downside. Without a viewfinder, photos looked like a bad frame.
Conclusion
While Ai Pin was occasionally useful and impressive, it was wrong, useless, or ineffective enough times to drive me back to my phone.
Gary Marcus, an AI entrepreneur, said that the mistakes Ai Pin made, like with the bagel, were the result of so-called hallucinations, the AI’s tendency to guess and make things up when it can’t find the right answer. This is a problem that remains unsolved in many AI technologies, such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Ms Bongiorno acknowledged that the hallucinations were happening with Gemini, the technology behind Ai Pin’s Vision feature. He added that the technology would rapidly improve with user feedback and that the company had already perfected the pin’s reaction to bagels.
Mr Marcus said no company yet had AI technology sophisticated enough to make a virtual assistant reliably answer questions.
“It’s almost like a broken clock is right twice a day,” he said. “It’s right sometimes, but you don’t know what part of the time, and that greatly diminishes its value.”
However, there is a core of an idea worth preserving. I liked having a helper in my shirt when it really came in handy. I’ll pin my hopes on future iterations of the product — perhaps a cheaper one that doesn’t have a camera and laser.
