Speaker 1: Sometimes real tech can seem like science fiction. This is the Humane AI pin beam me up, Scotty, and other times not so much. Look and tell me what is this?
Speaker 2: Luck is a 2022 film distributed by Apple TV plus about the story of Sam Greenfield. It is available for streaming on Apple tv, plus the [00:00:30] cast includes Eva Noble, Simon Peg, Jane Fonda, and John Ratzenberger,
Speaker 1: And sometimes AI will just misunderstand you and give you the wrong answer like that.
Speaker 1: The humane AI pin, which I’m wearing right now, is a little magnetic clip-on device that has its own sensors, microphone, camera, and also cell connectivity to allow you to talk to it and even display information onto your hand with lasers [00:01:00] to interact and get feedback about things around the world and to maybe help you live your life. The makers of humane have mostly come from Apple engineers who have experienced with things like the iPhone, the Apple Watch, AirPods, and you can see that design being baked into the look of this. It looks like the child of an Apple Watch and AirPods, very sleek metal, beautiful little thing, has a really cool collection of chargers and accessories. The clip-on part is also interesting. It uses magnets and [00:01:30] there are a variety of magnetic boosters that will clip on and magnetically charge right through your clothing. The fit is sometimes a little tough to get on, but once you do, it feels like wearing something right on your clothing and because there are swappable batteries, you don’t have to worry about the battery running out. Even then with the cellular connection, I found that the battery life lasts a whole day, which is a lot better than I got on things like Metas, AI glasses, the ray bands. There are two ways to interact with this. There’s a big touch pad here and [00:02:00] if you touch it and you talk to it, it’s like any sort of voice interactive AI system. What’s the weather
Speaker 2: Finding your temperature? The current weather in New York is cloudy with a temperature of 46 degrees Fahrenheit, eight degrees Celsius. There is no precipitation expected.
Speaker 1: Okay, well that’s pretty similar to most other voice activated things that you’ve done, but there’s a second way to interact, which is when you tap and then hold out your hand, it will throw [00:02:30] a laser projection onto your hand that can work with hand tracking, so now all of a sudden I can tap to control. I can actually tilt my hand to scroll through the interface and I can even move my hand forward and backward to have additional display level interactions. This type of hand tracking reminds me of the stuff that I use on AR and VR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro. The humane AI pin is basically doing the heads up display idea of glasses but without the glasses [00:03:00] part throwing up this near field display without having to put anything on your face. That’s a really wild idea and it takes a little bit of getting used to.
Speaker 1: The other thing that’s interesting about the humane AI pin is it’s also got a camera, so it can take photos and videos that you can upload and share later. The videos are only 15 seconds long though, which is a lot less than the minute you can get on META’S AI glasses. Now what this camera can also do is recognize the environment. This is the type of tech that’s appearing on [00:03:30] more AI wearables. META’S AI glasses are getting this feature this year and this can also recognize in beta things around you look and tell me what type of bike this is.
Speaker 2: It’s a RAs GXLV two commuter electric bike.
Speaker 1: Look and describe this can to me.
Speaker 2: [00:04:00] The CAN is a sparkling water called spindrift. It is a 12 ounce can with a light blue label that has a picture of an orange on it. The can is a little shorter than a standard 12 ounce can.
Speaker 1: Okay, the other wild thing this does is it’s an instant communicator pin. If you hold your two fingers down, you can speak and then have it translate into one of 50 languages right on the spot. My name is Scott Stein and I love Magic and improv
Speaker 2: [00:04:30] Scott Stein or improv
Speaker 1: Change Language to Italian, change language to French.
Speaker 2: Your AI pin cannot fulfill [00:05:00] this request at the moment. If you have any other questions or tasks, feel free to ask
Speaker 1: Change language to German.
Speaker 2: Your AI pin cannot fulfill the request to change the language at the moment. If you have any other questions or need assistance with something else,
Speaker 1: I need assistance. Feel free to ask. Changing the language.
Speaker 2: I got something your AI pin needs to cool down for a few minutes.
Speaker 1: Okay, now it suddenly overheated. Well, that [00:05:30] gets to some of the frustrations that I’ve been having with AI pin. It turns out that using this pin, it might be the laser display. I find that a lot of times it will say too warm to operate and then it will shut down temporarily and I can’t use it. That’s a problem. Also, that laser display is not bright enough for pretty bright outdoor conditions I found outside. It’s really hard to see. Same thing with that speaker. It may not be great in all situations, although you can pop in Bluetooth earbuds to connect with this. I also found that the AI features [00:06:00] leave a lot to be desired right now. First of all, you’re not connected to your phone. Your phone has all of your personal information on it. That’s where my whole life is organized and things like the meta ai ray bands, those do connect with your phone, not for all features, but for some and for music services is just title, which I subscribe to just to test this out.
Speaker 1: It does play music at the touch of a button, but so do a lot of other things and then the interface, the hand tracking interface is futuristic, but it’s also really [00:06:30] frustrating. Not only can I not always see it clearly even in dark conditions, but the ability to sort of tilt your hand and control it. Even for a seasoned ar vr vet like me takes a lot of practice and I felt like I was really straining at times because the throw distance changes depending on where you’ve positioned the pen sometimes it could be up here, sometimes it could be down here and I’m always kind of fumbling for it and you have to get that pinch right and the angle right. There’s a lot of juggling. It’s worse than using hand tracking or something like that on [00:07:00] a VR headset. And then there’s the subscription cost $24 a month, which if you’re using this as your only phone and it is a phone, sure, but everyone’s got a phone in their pocket.
Speaker 1: I don’t know who’s going out without a phone and I don’t think using this as a phone will get you very far. There are not a lot of things it connects to and unless you’re just making individual phone calls, it feels really frustrating. I also think that it needs to get a lot more hooked in with its AI features and maybe the phone helps with that because right [00:07:30] now I don’t really understand what I’m meant to be doing with it other than asking it questions and seeing if it understands what I’m talking about and that camera recognition feature needs to get better. It’s a fascinating concept, but I don’t think it’s fully there. The pros of it, the battery life is actually pretty long and there are swapable batteries. It is a self-contained phone and it’s kind of cool design plus that hand tracking’s. Fascinating.
Speaker 1: The AI is very hit and miss. It doesn’t have a lot of AI hook ins and it does [00:08:00] not connect to your phone at all. I think you can see as I’ve been using the humane AI pin that it’s frustrated me a lot. There are times it’s driven me fricking crazy and there are other times I’ve just wanted to take it off and not use it anymore and that’s a big downside. This pin is in a weird spot. I don’t like wearing a thing like this on my clothing. It’s not as comfortable as a watch or glasses and it’s way too limited and hit or miss and how it uses ai and there’s also that overheating stuff, so do I recommend [00:08:30] that you get one right now? Definitely not. Am I curious to see where it goes? Yeah, absolutely, but right now it looks like it’s trying to get a foothold in a landscape that’s going to need a lot more work. If you have any questions, please leave them below and thanks for watching.
https://www.cnet.com/rss/all/
Scott Stein
