At any given time, there are between five and eight phones on my desk. And by “my desk” I mean any combination of tables and countertops throughout my house. So when I saw the Humane ai Pin reviews start coming in last week, I did what any logical person would do: grab the nearest phone and try to turn it into my own ai wearable device.
Humane would like you to believe that its ai Pin represents consumer technology at its finest. The reviews and the insides of the pin say the opposite: it uses a four-year-old Snapdragon processor and it seems to work a custom version of Android 12.
“It's a mid-range Android phone!” I declared at our next team meeting, waving a mid-range Android phone for effect. “You could download Gemini and stick it on your shirt!” Simple. Trivial. Give me 10 minutes and I will have a more powerful ai device, I said.
Hardware is hard, y'all.
Ideally, I wanted an outward-facing camera and a decent voice assistant that I could use hands-free. An iPhone in a shirt pocket It was an intriguing but useless solution because a) none of my shirts have pockets and b) Siri just isn't that smart. So, my first prototype was a Motorola Razr Plus attached to the neckline of my shirt. As expected, this didn't work, but for reasons I didn't anticipate.
First of all, you can't download Gemini from the Play Store on a foldable phone. That was news to me. But even once I downloaded it and set it as the default assistant, I ran into another barrier: It's really difficult to use a voice assistant from the cover screen of a flip phone. The Razr wants you to open the phone before you can do anything more than get its attention with “Hey Google.”
Running Gemini in Chrome on the cover screen got me closer to what I was looking for. But trying to tap the buttons on the screen to activate the assistant didn't work very well, and neither did Google Lens out of the corner of my eye. Additionally, Gemini misinterpreted “recycle” on a toothpaste tube as “becicle,” and confidently told me it was an old word for glasses. It is not!
Prototype two was the same Razr foldable phone running ChatGPT in conversation mode on the cover screen. This meant that the application was constantly running and always listening, so it wasn't practical. But I tried anyway and it was a strange experience talking to an ai chatbot that I couldn't see.
I want an ai that can do things for me, not just think of ingredients to stir-fry
ChatGPT is a decent conversationalist, but we ran out of things to talk about pretty quickly once I exhausted my chatbot options: dinner recipes and plant care tips. I want an ai that can do things for me, not just think of ingredients to stir-fry.
I ditched the foldable concept and instead bought a Pixel 8 and a Pixel Watch 2. I set Gemini as the default assistant on the phone and figured that somehow that would apply to the watch as well. Mistaken. However, I still had one card left to play: a good pair of wireless headphones. Life on the cutting edge of technology, baby.
But you know what? In a way it worked. I had to leave Gemini open and running on my phone since Google doesn't fully support Gemini Assistant on headphones. But I took a photo of a Blue Apron recipe I was making for dinner, told Gemini to remember it, and left my phone on the counter. As I moved around the kitchen, I asked Gemini questions that he would normally have to glance at the recipe to answer like, “How long do I roast vegetables?” and “How do I prepare the fish?” She gave me the right answers every time.
What was most impressive is that I was able to ask him tangential questions. She helped me use pantry ingredients to recreate a seasoning blend I didn't have on hand. I asked him why the recipe required me to divide the sauce into two servings and he gave me a plausible answer. And it did something the Humane pin still can't do: set a timer.
It wasn't perfect. First, I had to unplug the Google Home drive that was on the counter because it kept trying to get in. Gemini also told me that she couldn't play an album on Spotify, something the Google Home speaker has been doing for the most part. of a decade. The watch was useful for that at least.
What started as a silly gimmick has convinced me of two things: I truly believe we're going to use ai to do more things in the future, and furthermore, the future of ai devices is just phones. They're phones!
I love gadgets, but guys, I lived through the era when camera companies tried to convince us that we all needed to carry a compact camera and our phones everywhere. Earned phones. The phones already come with powerful processors, decent heat dissipation, and sophisticated wireless connectivity. An ai device that works independently of your phone has to solve all that.
And you know what looks a lot less silly than a pin with a laser on its chest? Headphones. People willingly wear them all day long right now. And the dumb factor definitely matters when it comes to wearable devices. I struggle to see how a separate device can outperform the humble phone plus a pair of headphones or something like Meta Ray Bans. Maybe there is room in our lives and our pockets for dedicated ai hardware – the gadget lover in me totally agrees. But I think it's more likely that we have all the ingredients we need to make good ai hardware in front of us.
