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Humane AI Pin review: not even close

85 points by poniko 3y ago

bronsonarnold33 3y ago
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SayerJet 3y ago
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julieharrison66 2y ago
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bluegarland692 2y ago
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poniko 3y ago
When it first reads back what it seems to be UTF8 text encoding error and then the backend LLM instructions you kinda knows it's a dud.
wepple 3y ago
I suspect anyone who works in tech is completely unsurprised. Sure, the tech exists to make this thing possible, but it requires an Apple-sized company to execute on it, and even then it’s utility would be doubtful There’s been a lot of pulling back on smart speakers because they’re not quite where they need to be - and this promised far far more than a smart speaker from a tiny new company. The question is: did they believe they own hype or know it’s a sham?
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  There are a lot of assumptions that have to hold, for basic functionality of this product. For example: an always-on connection. By the looks of it, this device uses 4g, and doesn't support 5g, so over time we might expect service to get worse as telecoms build out their 5+g networks and leave the 4g ones behind.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  I think they just want to advertise all the patents they filed and get bought.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- harryp_peng 3y ago
  just look at it - perplexity wrapper with native hardware. perplexity has vision! and besides perplexity, it just uses some simple function calling to get weather etc. I can build that in a day. as of the ultimate vision, it is not yet clear, and it would be dumb for anyone to get into this "AI phone replacement" business. There are far better use cases tho, which are clear to execute, like Schiffman.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  They want to get enough attention to get acquired. Meanwhile I’m sure they believe their own hype to some extent, but it’s very easy to delude yourself when billions of dollars are on the line.
  - harryp_peng 3y ago
    I cannot believe this paradigm, how new multi million dollar startups are basic wrappers that can be built by anyone interested enough in less than a day
- paxys 3y ago
  Not even an Apple-sized company will be able to successfully execute on it if the customer doesn't want the device to begin with. Look at VR headsets, for example. All the biggest tech behemoths burning through billions haven't been able to make the device category work, simply because no one wants to sit at home with a bulky headset strapped to their head shut off from their family and the outside world. Similarly a little box pinned to your chest projecting a display on your palm showing the weather makes for a good tech demo, but ultimately there is no real world use case for this device.
  - kelsey98765431 3y ago
    The purpose of headsets in the commercial product category is an attempt to subsidize development of military visors. the worlds largest customer, the federal government, definitely wants this.
- ergl 3y ago
  Anyone that has used Siri would tell you that not even Apple could make this work
  - jerlam 3y ago
    Half of this review is my exact same experience when trying out the Apple Watch eight years ago.
- MyFirstSass 3y ago
  I as a single dev who browsed r/locallama a bit the past 6 months could put together a crude small AI sys with or without say a 3b model that could: Set an alarm, Create a reminder, Or even attempt some of the more advanced features like querying local business. The fact that it can't even set an alarm or create a reminder? Like what the actual? Solo devs are already doing way more advanced stuff than this, it doesn't even take a small startup. What takes an Apple sized company is creating something that can access many other platforms, buy for you, put together bulletproof many step processes and execute on them safely etc. But most of these failures are like basic basic stuff. I do not understand how they can release a product like this.
nerdjon 3y ago
This is honestly kinda glorious, a company that seems to want to use AI as every other word to get as many investors to give them money as possible shoehorns AI with a reputation for hallucination into an expensive device that isn't even close to the promise if what it could do. That just screams a culmination of the last couple of years of "AI" and I am kinda loving that this happened. Maybe, just maybe, Investors will finally realize that this isn't as magical of tech as the companies like to claim and can't be shoved into every single thing hoping for magical results. Am I being too hopeful?
- palla89 3y ago
  this is the same hope and thoughts I have!
- chankstein38 3y ago
  >Am I being too hopeful? I hope not but I would guess yes. It's insane to me that anyone even bought this thing. Their marketing couldn't even show it in a positive light. It got things wrong, it seemed pretty useless, and the whole presentation that I watched felt like they were being held captive and forced to do things. The thing is connected to T-Mob which, in my mind, is one of the worse networks out there. AND it's $700. But they sold some. Why would people buy it? Who looked at any of that and thought "YES! Let's throw $700 away for this poorly developed toy?!"
  - nerdjon 3y ago
    > I hope not but I would guess yes. I unfortunately kinda agree, this alone likely won't do anything. But given the high likelihood of more than a few of these projects getting a ton of money coming out and burning in a similar way. I think it will eventually happen after getting a few bad products.
bronco21016 3y ago
I think it’s obvious that the current crop of models are just not quite there yet. The ability to give them “tools” that interact with the things we want to interact with is just going to take time. Ideally it would be a model that just “gets it” similar to the ideas Adept AI are pursuing by interacting directly with the UI. The bigger issue with this thing though… why does it need to be its own device? It’s not going to replace your phone so why not just have this all happen on your phone?
- fesc 3y ago
  Some YouTuber talked about this and I think they were pretty on point: Of course for consumers this could all happen in some app on the phone. But a 3rd party app will always be less integrated, have less permissions than functionality included by the manufacturer. And for all this AI integration wide access is pretty much required as you'd want it to access your photos, notes, all kind of apps, etc. This way manufacturers would have too much leverage over companies developing that kind of AI, as they could always develop better features than them with their own AI agent. I think Apple Watch is a pretty good example of that already. Third party watches will never be as good as Apple Watch just because Apple won't let them.
- invig 3y ago
  Apple and Google will do that, no one else will be allowed to. Even if you could get the necessary device permissions (you can't), you're going to get sherlocked and be dead next year when Apple and Google bake whatever interesting thing you did into the OS and all apps get it for free. You're at such a disadvantage on iOS and Android that it's a fools errand to try and build that app.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  > why does it need to be its own device? For AI to augment the lives of to the extend the iPhone did it's essential for it to be always on listening and able to act effortlessly. Only Apple, Google and major android makers can deliver this experience. There is however a window of opportunity for a team with the right talent to get there first if they're able to build their own device in time. Apple are too privacy conscious to send all the data up to the server so we need to wait till they can build chips to do that locally or figure out a way to bend their own rules enough that makes it seem privacy focused, they also have a much weaker ML team so there is extra runway there while they choose who to acquire to fix that. Google while extremely strong ML team its too academia brained to productize AI currently so need to wait for them to solve that, they also just suck at shipping products in general. They'll get there in the end but it's safe to say they'll only get there once someone else has shown how it should be done then they'll just clone it. You have about 3 years before Apple solves this, so if you get yours to market and succeed in that time you capture a segment of the market before that happens.
nashadelic 3y ago
I think most of the latency issues will improve as token generation does as will accuracy. The device is just a conduit, it represents the state of LLMs today, you can't ask for more from a I/O device.
sim04ful 3y ago
The fundamental issue with this tech is that they're trying to pair high density information with a low bandwidth input interface (less than a handful of finger gestures) and voice input which is flawed; you can't pause, backtrack to correct mistakes, and is highly dependent on external context.
- nashadelic 3y ago
  I think is voice and image is pretty high density and that's the future of most/all consumer interfaces with AI, no?
  - sim04ful 3y ago
    IMO, It's just not something that can be improved no matter how much effort is put into it Speech IO is unreliable for anything serious, not to mention awkward in public, it's also easily attenuated in very trivial situations.
  - sim04ful 3y ago
    Image is the highest density method of communication we have (a huge portion of our brains are used for just this) but interfacing/responding/reacting to this information via a crippled gesture system and voice is a huge bottleneck. So this can be avoided by intelligently reducing the dimensionality of this incoming data (potentially with AI) and/or increasing input bandwidth
  - potatolicious 3y ago
    Voice is very high density as an input modality, but that's a double-edged sword. It's fantastic for expressing complex requests that would otherwise be a lot of effort/time consuming on a less-information-dense interface. But voice has a higher "floor" for ease of use. It's easier to tap a button to confirm than it is to speak "Yes, ok" out loud. It's also more socially appropriate in more circumstances. The other problem is that voice is very low density as an output modality compared to the status quo, which are high-resolution screens. The amount of time it would take to express even the most basic of information (imagine speaking the HN home page out loud vs. reading it!) is pretty extreme. Where this forms a bad combination are tasks where it's not realistic for the user to utter the full complex request at once, where the user must consult intermediate outputs to determine the next action. In that case you're in a really vicious scenario: the density of voice input is not really necessary, while the low-density of voice output slows the task down dramatically. For example, think of a use case where you're booking a flight: "I want to see flights from San Francisco to New York". It's not really possible for the user to fully define a booking in their initial voice input - the user would reasonably want to review choices, pick seats, etc, necessitating that the task be multi-step. Now imagine if voice was the exclusive modality - the UX would be positively painful. > "that's the future of most/all consumer interfaces with AI, no?" And this is why I disagree with this statement. I think the idea that voice is the dominant user interface is far from obvious, especially when it comes to AI systems. LLM hype men tend to hand-wave around the complexities of this: "the AI will automatically pick the best possible flight for you! Why would you even want to review your choices?!" - which conveniently dismisses every area of weakness for this UX with "the AI will do it for you, trust it"... and time will tell but I suspect that will not work out that way.
paxys 3y ago
What I don't understand is, this device has been in development since 2018. Obviously the founders didn't intend it to be a ChatGPT wrapper many years before ChatGPT existed. So what was the original vision, and what made them do a half-assed last minute pivot and redo the whole thing right before launch?
- metalrain 3y ago
  Maybe to be accessory to your phone, reduce screentime etc.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    I don't get the screentime argument. The way to reduce screentime is to move people off Instagram/TikTok to platforms that aren't optimising for engagement as much, not to make a fancy mini phone for booking Ubers and checking when my flights are, which constitutes almost no phone usage at scale.
    - peanuty1 3y ago
      I don't think the Humane Pin is capable of booking an Uber or placing an order on DoorDash or Amazon.
      - danpalmer 3y ago
        No and that just reinforces the point. The Humane Pin is solving the utility part of what we use our phones for, but our phones have nailed this, with app stores, a screen, and highly optimised booking/checkout flows. The Humane Pin is aiming at this market, but with far less utility, ability, stability. They say they want to minimise the time we spend on our phones, but I don't regret the 7 seconds it takes to google an actor in the show I'm watching, or the 20 seconds it takes to book an Uber. I regret the 15 minutes I spend scrolling reddit on the toilet, or the hour I spend watching YouTube before bed. That's not the market they're taking aim at.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
rcarmo 3y ago
I'm surprised they made it so much worse than, say, Siri on an Apple Watch (which is something I've been using for years, and which might well become my only phone if Apple ever allows me to fully manage a watch from an iPad mini).
- MBCook 3y ago
  A BRAND NEW Apple Watch SE with cellular is $330 (and it goes on sale sometimes). You’ll have to add it to your cell plan which is usually $10 a month. Siri works great for a lot of the basic use cases that didn’t work in the video. Reminders, notes, alarms, messaging. Honestly I’m guessing it would work just as well for some of the knowledge questions that they asked. Except if you do that you get an Apple Watch. It tells the time too. It also counts your steps, tracks your heart rate, functions as an exercise/fitness tracker, does a better job of showing your notifications, can stream music from services other than Tidal, can actually show Photos and Web results and emails (although the screen is obviously tiny). It doesn’t have a camera though. So that’s $370 less for the device and $15 less per month? For something that already works way better? And doesn’t seem to run the risk of burning you and constantly turning itself off due to overheating? Hey look! That’s saving enough money that you could actually buy a second Apple Watch and still come out ahead. Wow this is a dud. I wasn’t expecting it to set the world on fire. I wasn’t even expecting it to be good. I did not imagine it would be THIS bad. The two things I use Siri for more than anything else or reminders and texting. And this thing can’t do either one.
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    > Siri works great for a lot of the basic use cases that didn’t work in the video. Reminders, notes, alarms, messaging. Honestly I’m guessing it would work just as well for some of the knowledge questions that they asked. It just doesn't or people would be using it and people wouldn't be as excited about LLMs as they are. Comparing Alexa/Siri style, it works if you know the right trigger words and how it expects you to ask the question, also just does that one thing you can't follow on and expand on it is just a completely different world to what an LLM agent can do. Apple Watch and Siri are dead products for good reasons.
dbbk 3y ago
A 4/10 is way too high for this review, when the conclusion is it barely ever works and instead "just buy an Apple watch".
- internetter 3y ago
  The unwritten rules of tech reviews is your review must fall between 4 and 9.5
- paxys 3y ago
  It's sleek and shiny. It powers on. The battery lasts. It has some unique input/output mechanisms. They have been able to solve manufacturing challenges at scale. All that should be more than enough to get it to a 4. I can imagine significantly worse devices deserving a 1 or 2.
  - skywhopper 3y ago
    It’s not clear yet that they’ve solved potential manufacturing challenges. The reviewer’s device worked, but the company would have vetted what they were sending. How many do they actually have on hand to deliver, and will they all be of top quality?
  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    a product that doesnt work but looks cool gets a 4? this is part of the problem. there isnt much more left to be worse
    - Marsymars 3y ago
      Well there are various smart watches in the "tens of dollars" range on AliExpress. Maybe The Verge could do a review of one of them?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Their conclusion seems to be that no-one should buy it. That, surely, should be a 0.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
> this wearable computer promises to free you from your smartphone. Here's an even more effective solution: stop using your smartphone! After I stopped using my phone, I realized it had almost no value except some diversionary value that was actually just a distraction in disguise. I still have to use it at times such as 2FA, but other than that I rarely use it.
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  What do you use to communicate with other humans?
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Mouth. Email and social media still work great on desktops/tablets too!
  - Kuinox 3y ago
    You can speak to them directly.
    - dpkirchner 3y ago
      "Last minute change folks, the venue is totally full. We're going to go somewhere else. Fred is still riding in on his penny-farthing -- who wants to call him to let him know? not it"
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Email on a computer? Voice and in person? A telephone that you plug into a wall?
    - dbbk 3y ago
      I mean you could still achieve the same thing with an iPhone that's just always kept in Do Not Disturb...
      - 3y ago
criddell 3y ago
Humane wants to free us from our smartphones. I wonder if that's only because apps like theirs are not allowed on the iPhone?
deleted 3y ago
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exitb 3y ago
I firmly believe that AI is the future of user interface, but to believe that a device like this can displace a smartphone is just crazy. It's obvious that the phone manufacturers are racing to add deep AI integration into their operating systems. How is it better to have another device, when we all already have one that's suitable to host it in our pockets.
sobellian 3y ago
Another company that raised hundreds of millions pre-PMF (indeed, pre-product) and then releasing a dud. I still remember wondering how Clinkle raised so much money. Look how far we've come since then!
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  I mean the team has a lot of ex-iPhone and ex-iPad people so its not like a random bet on nothing, you're betting on if part of the magic that made those products left the building with these people. Easy to say it didn't now we've seen it but still.
benguild 3y ago
These guys are probably not going to get a second try at this either with these types of headlines, and Sam Altman investing in or creating another device :(
petesergeant 3y ago
> “AI Pin and its AI OS, Cosmos, are about beginning the story of ambient computing,” Humane’s co-founders, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, told me in a statement after I described some of the issues I’ve had with the AI Pin. “Today marks not the first chapter, but the first page That statement is several red flags.
- concinds 3y ago
  "Hu.ma.ne" will be seen as the new Theranos. They're half bad-parody of Apple, half cult.
daft_pink 3y ago
Pretty sure a cellular apple watch is a better choice if you want to leave your phone behind and not get sucked into distracting apps. Cheaper and no $24 monthly fee.
MichaelTheGeek 3y ago
Cold title.
danpalmer 3y ago
This and the Rabbit R1 are both trying to reduce the amount we use our phones, but I think this presents a fundamental misunderstanding of the jobs to be done on phones and how we actually use them. There are broadly two use-cases of phones: content consumption, and utility. The former sucks time to increase "engagement" and has a bunch of social issues around it, the latter does not. Both of these devices are trying to reduce the time we spend on our phones by addressing the utility aspect, but that's the wrong piece to focus on. The utility aspect is things like checking the time or calendar, booking an Uber, getting food delivered, etc. Many of these utilities however are essentially very optimised checkout funnels. Booking an Uber is really easy, because Uber are incentivised to make it easy. Same with ordering pizza. Taking a highly optimised flow and sticking voice on top isn't going to save time and is going to cause issues. These devices solve the wrong problem. If a company really wants to improve the world by reducing phone usage (rather than just build their own platform to rent-seek on), maybe they should be looking at social networking, communication, federation, etc.
- tomgp 3y ago
  I think there's something in this. Watching the video made me realise that my main irritations with my phone are born of the bit where I have to navigate through a minefield of distrations to add an item to my todo list, or check my calendar, or send a text message. All the "what bridge am I looking at stuff" is cute but feels like solving a problem I never really encounter. Anyway, I'm guess I'm going to try and use Siri more, ubnlock my phone less.
  - invig 3y ago
    I don't want to unlock to the home screen, I want to unlock to Apple Notes or Notion or whatever your favourite flavour of notes app is. Being allowed to replace the home screen with some app would be game changing for making the device feel helpful rather than like the little universe of chaos that is is. Let me access other things from the app switcher. Alas, we will never be allowed to do that.
    - balls187 2y ago
nkotov 3y ago
On one hand, it's not surprising given where we are at with tech. But on the other, I still think it's really exciting. It gives us a glimpse into what the future post-smartphone could look like.
deleted 3y ago
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joshcsimmons 3y ago
Absolutely brutal but mostly what I expected. Too bad - it's a paradigm ahead of its time! Seems to echo the general reception to the first VR headsets.
aidendara775 2y ago
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jeanniegolabek 2y ago
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TradingPlaces 3y ago
I expected it to be bad, but wow.
Brunocarl9 3y ago
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classified 3y ago
I mean, putting "AI" and "humane" in the same phrase is a dead giveaway that this 1st of April will last a whole year.

85 points by poniko 3y ago

bronsonarnold33 3y ago

[flagged]

SayerJet 3y ago

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julieharrison66 2y ago

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bluegarland692 2y ago

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poniko 3y ago

When it first reads back what it seems to be UTF8 text encoding error and then the backend LLM instructions you kinda knows it's a dud.

wepple 3y ago

I suspect anyone who works in tech is completely unsurprised. Sure, the tech exists to make this thing possible, but it requires an Apple-sized company to execute on it, and even then it’s utility would be doubtful There’s been a lot of pulling back on smart speakers because they’re not quite where they need to be - and this promised far far more than a smart speaker from a tiny new company. The question is: did they believe they own hype or know it’s a sham?

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
There are a lot of assumptions that have to hold, for basic functionality of this product. For example: an always-on connection. By the looks of it, this device uses 4g, and doesn't support 5g, so over time we might expect service to get worse as telecoms build out their 5+g networks and leave the 4g ones behind.
sdenton4 3y ago
I think they just want to advertise all the patents they filed and get bought.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
harryp_peng 3y ago
just look at it - perplexity wrapper with native hardware. perplexity has vision! and besides perplexity, it just uses some simple function calling to get weather etc. I can build that in a day. as of the ultimate vision, it is not yet clear, and it would be dumb for anyone to get into this "AI phone replacement" business. There are far better use cases tho, which are clear to execute, like Schiffman.
skywhopper 3y ago
They want to get enough attention to get acquired. Meanwhile I’m sure they believe their own hype to some extent, but it’s very easy to delude yourself when billions of dollars are on the line.
- harryp_peng 3y ago
  I cannot believe this paradigm, how new multi million dollar startups are basic wrappers that can be built by anyone interested enough in less than a day
paxys 3y ago
Not even an Apple-sized company will be able to successfully execute on it if the customer doesn't want the device to begin with. Look at VR headsets, for example. All the biggest tech behemoths burning through billions haven't been able to make the device category work, simply because no one wants to sit at home with a bulky headset strapped to their head shut off from their family and the outside world. Similarly a little box pinned to your chest projecting a display on your palm showing the weather makes for a good tech demo, but ultimately there is no real world use case for this device.
- kelsey98765431 3y ago
  The purpose of headsets in the commercial product category is an attempt to subsidize development of military visors. the worlds largest customer, the federal government, definitely wants this.
ergl 3y ago
Anyone that has used Siri would tell you that not even Apple could make this work
- jerlam 3y ago
  Half of this review is my exact same experience when trying out the Apple Watch eight years ago.
MyFirstSass 3y ago
I as a single dev who browsed r/locallama a bit the past 6 months could put together a crude small AI sys with or without say a 3b model that could: Set an alarm, Create a reminder, Or even attempt some of the more advanced features like querying local business. The fact that it can't even set an alarm or create a reminder? Like what the actual? Solo devs are already doing way more advanced stuff than this, it doesn't even take a small startup. What takes an Apple sized company is creating something that can access many other platforms, buy for you, put together bulletproof many step processes and execute on them safely etc. But most of these failures are like basic basic stuff. I do not understand how they can release a product like this.

nerdjon 3y ago

This is honestly kinda glorious, a company that seems to want to use AI as every other word to get as many investors to give them money as possible shoehorns AI with a reputation for hallucination into an expensive device that isn't even close to the promise if what it could do. That just screams a culmination of the last couple of years of "AI" and I am kinda loving that this happened. Maybe, just maybe, Investors will finally realize that this isn't as magical of tech as the companies like to claim and can't be shoved into every single thing hoping for magical results. Am I being too hopeful?

palla89 3y ago
this is the same hope and thoughts I have!
chankstein38 3y ago
>Am I being too hopeful? I hope not but I would guess yes. It's insane to me that anyone even bought this thing. Their marketing couldn't even show it in a positive light. It got things wrong, it seemed pretty useless, and the whole presentation that I watched felt like they were being held captive and forced to do things. The thing is connected to T-Mob which, in my mind, is one of the worse networks out there. AND it's $700. But they sold some. Why would people buy it? Who looked at any of that and thought "YES! Let's throw $700 away for this poorly developed toy?!"
- nerdjon 3y ago
  > I hope not but I would guess yes. I unfortunately kinda agree, this alone likely won't do anything. But given the high likelihood of more than a few of these projects getting a ton of money coming out and burning in a similar way. I think it will eventually happen after getting a few bad products.

bronco21016 3y ago

I think it’s obvious that the current crop of models are just not quite there yet. The ability to give them “tools” that interact with the things we want to interact with is just going to take time. Ideally it would be a model that just “gets it” similar to the ideas Adept AI are pursuing by interacting directly with the UI. The bigger issue with this thing though… why does it need to be its own device? It’s not going to replace your phone so why not just have this all happen on your phone?

fesc 3y ago
Some YouTuber talked about this and I think they were pretty on point: Of course for consumers this could all happen in some app on the phone. But a 3rd party app will always be less integrated, have less permissions than functionality included by the manufacturer. And for all this AI integration wide access is pretty much required as you'd want it to access your photos, notes, all kind of apps, etc. This way manufacturers would have too much leverage over companies developing that kind of AI, as they could always develop better features than them with their own AI agent. I think Apple Watch is a pretty good example of that already. Third party watches will never be as good as Apple Watch just because Apple won't let them.
invig 3y ago
Apple and Google will do that, no one else will be allowed to. Even if you could get the necessary device permissions (you can't), you're going to get sherlocked and be dead next year when Apple and Google bake whatever interesting thing you did into the OS and all apps get it for free. You're at such a disadvantage on iOS and Android that it's a fools errand to try and build that app.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
> why does it need to be its own device? For AI to augment the lives of to the extend the iPhone did it's essential for it to be always on listening and able to act effortlessly. Only Apple, Google and major android makers can deliver this experience. There is however a window of opportunity for a team with the right talent to get there first if they're able to build their own device in time. Apple are too privacy conscious to send all the data up to the server so we need to wait till they can build chips to do that locally or figure out a way to bend their own rules enough that makes it seem privacy focused, they also have a much weaker ML team so there is extra runway there while they choose who to acquire to fix that. Google while extremely strong ML team its too academia brained to productize AI currently so need to wait for them to solve that, they also just suck at shipping products in general. They'll get there in the end but it's safe to say they'll only get there once someone else has shown how it should be done then they'll just clone it. You have about 3 years before Apple solves this, so if you get yours to market and succeed in that time you capture a segment of the market before that happens.

nashadelic 3y ago

I think most of the latency issues will improve as token generation does as will accuracy. The device is just a conduit, it represents the state of LLMs today, you can't ask for more from a I/O device.

sim04ful 3y ago

The fundamental issue with this tech is that they're trying to pair high density information with a low bandwidth input interface (less than a handful of finger gestures) and voice input which is flawed; you can't pause, backtrack to correct mistakes, and is highly dependent on external context.

nashadelic 3y ago
I think is voice and image is pretty high density and that's the future of most/all consumer interfaces with AI, no?
- sim04ful 3y ago
  IMO, It's just not something that can be improved no matter how much effort is put into it Speech IO is unreliable for anything serious, not to mention awkward in public, it's also easily attenuated in very trivial situations.
- sim04ful 3y ago
  Image is the highest density method of communication we have (a huge portion of our brains are used for just this) but interfacing/responding/reacting to this information via a crippled gesture system and voice is a huge bottleneck. So this can be avoided by intelligently reducing the dimensionality of this incoming data (potentially with AI) and/or increasing input bandwidth
- potatolicious 3y ago
  Voice is very high density as an input modality, but that's a double-edged sword. It's fantastic for expressing complex requests that would otherwise be a lot of effort/time consuming on a less-information-dense interface. But voice has a higher "floor" for ease of use. It's easier to tap a button to confirm than it is to speak "Yes, ok" out loud. It's also more socially appropriate in more circumstances. The other problem is that voice is very low density as an output modality compared to the status quo, which are high-resolution screens. The amount of time it would take to express even the most basic of information (imagine speaking the HN home page out loud vs. reading it!) is pretty extreme. Where this forms a bad combination are tasks where it's not realistic for the user to utter the full complex request at once, where the user must consult intermediate outputs to determine the next action. In that case you're in a really vicious scenario: the density of voice input is not really necessary, while the low-density of voice output slows the task down dramatically. For example, think of a use case where you're booking a flight: "I want to see flights from San Francisco to New York". It's not really possible for the user to fully define a booking in their initial voice input - the user would reasonably want to review choices, pick seats, etc, necessitating that the task be multi-step. Now imagine if voice was the exclusive modality - the UX would be positively painful. > "that's the future of most/all consumer interfaces with AI, no?" And this is why I disagree with this statement. I think the idea that voice is the dominant user interface is far from obvious, especially when it comes to AI systems. LLM hype men tend to hand-wave around the complexities of this: "the AI will automatically pick the best possible flight for you! Why would you even want to review your choices?!" - which conveniently dismisses every area of weakness for this UX with "the AI will do it for you, trust it"... and time will tell but I suspect that will not work out that way.

paxys 3y ago

What I don't understand is, this device has been in development since 2018. Obviously the founders didn't intend it to be a ChatGPT wrapper many years before ChatGPT existed. So what was the original vision, and what made them do a half-assed last minute pivot and redo the whole thing right before launch?

metalrain 3y ago
Maybe to be accessory to your phone, reduce screentime etc.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I don't get the screentime argument. The way to reduce screentime is to move people off Instagram/TikTok to platforms that aren't optimising for engagement as much, not to make a fancy mini phone for booking Ubers and checking when my flights are, which constitutes almost no phone usage at scale.
  - peanuty1 3y ago
    I don't think the Humane Pin is capable of booking an Uber or placing an order on DoorDash or Amazon.
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      No and that just reinforces the point. The Humane Pin is solving the utility part of what we use our phones for, but our phones have nailed this, with app stores, a screen, and highly optimised booking/checkout flows. The Humane Pin is aiming at this market, but with far less utility, ability, stability. They say they want to minimise the time we spend on our phones, but I don't regret the 7 seconds it takes to google an actor in the show I'm watching, or the 20 seconds it takes to book an Uber. I regret the 15 minutes I spend scrolling reddit on the toilet, or the hour I spend watching YouTube before bed. That's not the market they're taking aim at.
dragonwriter 3y ago

rcarmo 3y ago

I'm surprised they made it so much worse than, say, Siri on an Apple Watch (which is something I've been using for years, and which might well become my only phone if Apple ever allows me to fully manage a watch from an iPad mini).

MBCook 3y ago
A BRAND NEW Apple Watch SE with cellular is $330 (and it goes on sale sometimes). You’ll have to add it to your cell plan which is usually $10 a month. Siri works great for a lot of the basic use cases that didn’t work in the video. Reminders, notes, alarms, messaging. Honestly I’m guessing it would work just as well for some of the knowledge questions that they asked. Except if you do that you get an Apple Watch. It tells the time too. It also counts your steps, tracks your heart rate, functions as an exercise/fitness tracker, does a better job of showing your notifications, can stream music from services other than Tidal, can actually show Photos and Web results and emails (although the screen is obviously tiny). It doesn’t have a camera though. So that’s $370 less for the device and $15 less per month? For something that already works way better? And doesn’t seem to run the risk of burning you and constantly turning itself off due to overheating? Hey look! That’s saving enough money that you could actually buy a second Apple Watch and still come out ahead. Wow this is a dud. I wasn’t expecting it to set the world on fire. I wasn’t even expecting it to be good. I did not imagine it would be THIS bad. The two things I use Siri for more than anything else or reminders and texting. And this thing can’t do either one.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  > Siri works great for a lot of the basic use cases that didn’t work in the video. Reminders, notes, alarms, messaging. Honestly I’m guessing it would work just as well for some of the knowledge questions that they asked. It just doesn't or people would be using it and people wouldn't be as excited about LLMs as they are. Comparing Alexa/Siri style, it works if you know the right trigger words and how it expects you to ask the question, also just does that one thing you can't follow on and expand on it is just a completely different world to what an LLM agent can do. Apple Watch and Siri are dead products for good reasons.

dbbk 3y ago

A 4/10 is way too high for this review, when the conclusion is it barely ever works and instead "just buy an Apple watch".

internetter 3y ago
The unwritten rules of tech reviews is your review must fall between 4 and 9.5
paxys 3y ago
It's sleek and shiny. It powers on. The battery lasts. It has some unique input/output mechanisms. They have been able to solve manufacturing challenges at scale. All that should be more than enough to get it to a 4. I can imagine significantly worse devices deserving a 1 or 2.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  It’s not clear yet that they’ve solved potential manufacturing challenges. The reviewer’s device worked, but the company would have vetted what they were sending. How many do they actually have on hand to deliver, and will they all be of top quality?
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  a product that doesnt work but looks cool gets a 4? this is part of the problem. there isnt much more left to be worse
  - Marsymars 3y ago
    Well there are various smart watches in the "tens of dollars" range on AliExpress. Maybe The Verge could do a review of one of them?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Their conclusion seems to be that no-one should buy it. That, surely, should be a 0.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

> this wearable computer promises to free you from your smartphone. Here's an even more effective solution: stop using your smartphone! After I stopped using my phone, I realized it had almost no value except some diversionary value that was actually just a distraction in disguise. I still have to use it at times such as 2FA, but other than that I rarely use it.

jgrahamc 3y ago
What do you use to communicate with other humans?
- itishappy 3y ago
  Mouth. Email and social media still work great on desktops/tablets too!
- Kuinox 3y ago
  You can speak to them directly.
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    "Last minute change folks, the venue is totally full. We're going to go somewhere else. Fred is still riding in on his penny-farthing -- who wants to call him to let him know? not it"
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Email on a computer? Voice and in person? A telephone that you plug into a wall?
  - dbbk 3y ago
    I mean you could still achieve the same thing with an iPhone that's just always kept in Do Not Disturb...
    - 3y ago

criddell 3y ago

Humane wants to free us from our smartphones. I wonder if that's only because apps like theirs are not allowed on the iPhone?

deleted 3y ago

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exitb 3y ago

I firmly believe that AI is the future of user interface, but to believe that a device like this can displace a smartphone is just crazy. It's obvious that the phone manufacturers are racing to add deep AI integration into their operating systems. How is it better to have another device, when we all already have one that's suitable to host it in our pockets.

sobellian 3y ago

Another company that raised hundreds of millions pre-PMF (indeed, pre-product) and then releasing a dud. I still remember wondering how Clinkle raised so much money. Look how far we've come since then!

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
I mean the team has a lot of ex-iPhone and ex-iPad people so its not like a random bet on nothing, you're betting on if part of the magic that made those products left the building with these people. Easy to say it didn't now we've seen it but still.

benguild 3y ago

These guys are probably not going to get a second try at this either with these types of headlines, and Sam Altman investing in or creating another device :(

petesergeant 3y ago

> “AI Pin and its AI OS, Cosmos, are about beginning the story of ambient computing,” Humane’s co-founders, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, told me in a statement after I described some of the issues I’ve had with the AI Pin. “Today marks not the first chapter, but the first page That statement is several red flags.

concinds 3y ago
"Hu.ma.ne" will be seen as the new Theranos. They're half bad-parody of Apple, half cult.

daft_pink 3y ago

Pretty sure a cellular apple watch is a better choice if you want to leave your phone behind and not get sucked into distracting apps. Cheaper and no $24 monthly fee.

MichaelTheGeek 3y ago

Cold title.

danpalmer 3y ago

This and the Rabbit R1 are both trying to reduce the amount we use our phones, but I think this presents a fundamental misunderstanding of the jobs to be done on phones and how we actually use them. There are broadly two use-cases of phones: content consumption, and utility. The former sucks time to increase "engagement" and has a bunch of social issues around it, the latter does not. Both of these devices are trying to reduce the time we spend on our phones by addressing the utility aspect, but that's the wrong piece to focus on. The utility aspect is things like checking the time or calendar, booking an Uber, getting food delivered, etc. Many of these utilities however are essentially very optimised checkout funnels. Booking an Uber is really easy, because Uber are incentivised to make it easy. Same with ordering pizza. Taking a highly optimised flow and sticking voice on top isn't going to save time and is going to cause issues. These devices solve the wrong problem. If a company really wants to improve the world by reducing phone usage (rather than just build their own platform to rent-seek on), maybe they should be looking at social networking, communication, federation, etc.

tomgp 3y ago
I think there's something in this. Watching the video made me realise that my main irritations with my phone are born of the bit where I have to navigate through a minefield of distrations to add an item to my todo list, or check my calendar, or send a text message. All the "what bridge am I looking at stuff" is cute but feels like solving a problem I never really encounter. Anyway, I'm guess I'm going to try and use Siri more, ubnlock my phone less.
- invig 3y ago
  I don't want to unlock to the home screen, I want to unlock to Apple Notes or Notion or whatever your favourite flavour of notes app is. Being allowed to replace the home screen with some app would be game changing for making the device feel helpful rather than like the little universe of chaos that is is. Let me access other things from the app switcher. Alas, we will never be allowed to do that.
  - balls187 2y ago

nkotov 3y ago

On one hand, it's not surprising given where we are at with tech. But on the other, I still think it's really exciting. It gives us a glimpse into what the future post-smartphone could look like.

deleted 3y ago

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joshcsimmons 3y ago

Absolutely brutal but mostly what I expected. Too bad - it's a paradigm ahead of its time! Seems to echo the general reception to the first VR headsets.

aidendara775 2y ago

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jeanniegolabek 2y ago

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TradingPlaces 3y ago

I expected it to be bad, but wow.

Brunocarl9 3y ago

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classified 3y ago

I mean, putting "AI" and "humane" in the same phrase is a dead giveaway that this 1st of April will last a whole year.