Talking with Paresh Dave on the Humane Ai Pin: Hands-off with Phones, and How to Handle a Smartphone

On Thursday, after months of demos and hints about what the AI-powered future of gadgets might look like, Humane finally took the wraps off of its first device: the AI Pin.

The device, as we reported yesterday is a $699 Wearable and includes a square device and a battery pack that magnetically attach to your clothes or other surfaces. In addition to that price, there’s also the $24 monthly fee for a Humane subscription, which gets you a phone number and data coverage through T-Mobile’s network. The company told us that the device will be available for pre-order in November.

The AI Pin is powered by a Snapdragon processor — though it’s not clear which one — and you control it with a combination of voice control, a camera, gestures, and a small built-in projector. The Pin itself weighs about 34 grams, and the “battery booster” adds another 20. The built-in camera will take photos and videos after a software update.

Unlike a device like the Rewind Pendant, it’s not meant to be always recording, and it’s not even listening for a wake word. The device has a pin which blinks when it is activated, so you have to manually turn it on.

Phones are convenient, powerful devices, but they sure do gobble up a lot of our attention. How much of your day do you spend just holding your phone, staring at the screen? Humane, a company founded by a pair of ex-Apple employees, wants to squash the tyranny of the touchscreen. The company has developed a tiny device that can replicate the core functions of a phone, such as answering calls, sending messages, and translation. It uses voice controls, touch controls and a camera to sense the wearer’s intentions, crafts answers using machine intelligence and displays them on your hand with a tiny projector. Humane hopes that the device will allow it to free its customers from having to carry their phones everywhere.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave joins us to talk about his hands-off experience with the Humane Ai Pin and the future phone alternatives.

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The Humane Pin: An Embedded Device to Transform the Stereo World into a Smartphone and a Personal Technicolor

A San Francisco cop has been intrigued by the sight for months near the offices of the startup Humane. There was a small device pinned to employees’ chests, not unlike the officer’s body-worn camera. “Been wondering what those are,” the officer said when WIRED visited the company last week.

It is unclear if any of them can become socially acceptable or how they will be scrutinized by the fashion police. The members of the group that was created for the Humane fans can not wait to buy their Pins. But people consulted by WIRED who have worked on edgy wearable hardware, including augmented reality glasses, view the Pin as more the latest toy for gadget enthusiasts than a device set to establish a new norm for personal technology.

It is too early to know if the Pin will help people live more in the moment, or if it will simply provide a new way to be unhealthily obsessed with technology.

When Bongiorno and her husband, Imran Chaudhri, founded Humane in 2018 after long spans working on hardware design and software engineering at Apple, they set strict parameters for their product. It needed to be a standalone device connected directly to the cell network, transparent about when it’s recording, and not always listening for wake words like “Hey Siri” or “OK Google” as smart speakers and some phones do. The whole package should be affordable. Bongiorno says that the tone of where we are now was set by that.