- AI startup Humane officially launched its highly anticipated Ai pin on Thursday.
- The reveal video shows the Ai pin making calls, answering questions, and projecting info onto the user’s hand.
- Humane’s Ai pin starts at $699, require a monthly subscription, and ships next year.
Humane’s hotly anticipated Ai Pin is finally here.
Or at least we now know how it works, how much it costs (less than an iPhone, but with a monthly fee), and when you can pre-order it (next week) — but you’ll apparently have to wait until next year to actually get your hands on it.
In a new 10-minute video posted on Thursday, Humane cofounders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno — ex-Apple employees who also happen to be husband and wife — demonstrated the Ai pin.
Starting at $699, the Ai pin is a standalone, screenless AI-powered device that can attach to your clothing. Running on the GPT-4 large language model, the Ai pin includes a camera, sensors, speakers, a trust light, and a tiny projector that beams information on your hand.
Coming in three colors (eclipse, lunar, and equinox), the Ai pin package includes: a charge pad; a cable; an adapter; a charge case; an extra battery booster; and unlimited calls, text, and data for a dedicated cell number via Humane.
“It is our aim at Humane to build for the world not as it exists today, but as it could be tomorrow; one where we can take the full power of AI everywhere, and have it weave seamlessly into our everyday lives,” Chaudhri said during the demonstration.
Demonstrating its voice capabilities, Chaudhri asked the pin to “Play songs from famous sci-fi films.” In turn, a light beam projected onto his palm displaying information like the title of the song and its command buttons. He paused and skipped the song depending on how he moved his hand. The pin plugs into Tidal for its music catalogue.
The AI pin can also answer voice questions by scraping the web in real-time. To demonstrate this feature, Chaudhri asked the pin “When is the next eclipse and where is the best place to see it?” In a matter of seconds, the AI pin responded with “the next total solar eclipse will occur on April 8th 2024” and recommended him to see it in Australia or East Timor.
In terms of communication, Chaudhri demonstrated the AI pin’s ability to send and tweak texts to sound more enthusiastic, catch him up on his messages, identify bits of information within long messages, and make phone calls. He even showed the Ai pin translating Imran’s voice messages from English to Spanish.
Because it has a dedicated phone number through T-Mobile, you have to pay $24 per month on top of the cost of the device to use it.
The AI pin has computer vision capabilities as well. During the demonstration, Chaudhri held a handful of almonds and asked how much protein it had, to which the AI pin responded with “15 grams.” Imran even held up a book to the pin and got it to identify how much it costs online.
You can pre-order the Ai pin on November 16, but it’s not expected to ship starting next year, The New York Times reported.
The announcement comes as tech experts debate whether AI hardware like Humane’s pin have the potential to be the iPhone of the AI era. Other tech companies, from Meta to OpenAI and other startups, have been pursuing AI-focused gadgets.
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