Two to beam up.
You might remember the AI smartbadge by Humane. Now dubbed the AI Pin, its release inches ever closer. It offers a screen-free experience, where much of your calls, texts, inquiries, and whatever other communication tasks you might perform with a smartphone are instead handled with the touchpad or voice commands.
That said, they also touted the “Laser Ink Display”, which can project any of that text or what have you onto your hand with a projector. The camera also enables gestural controls, as well as allowing you to capture the moment in front of you. It also comes with swappable magnetic clips, which both affix it you whatever shirt or jacket you’re wearing, as well as power the device.
That all said, it’s worth circling back to that whole “AI” part of the name. As stated, it allows the use of AI models like Chat GPT and Microsoft AI, which comes with your subscription. Which dovetails nicely with the price.
An AI Pin will set you back $699 (~ £569 / AU$1,090), which also includes two spare battery clips. As for that subscription, it’ll run you $24 monthly in the US through T-Mobile. The upside is that this includes a phone number and unlimited data, and the pin allows for unlimited usage of AI with a cloud storage locker tossed in, too.
It’s still something of a hard sell to the average person, though. Ignore the subscription for a moment; there are any number of smartphones on the market, both below and up to AI Pin’s price, that do the majority of tasks it can do, and more (I doubt you’ll be playing Candy Crush or whatever gacha waifu trash on your AI Pin).
While novel and innovative, much of the gestural and speech features might not perform as advertised in real life situations. Anyone with a digital assistant like Alexa knows that sometimes, things get lost in the conversation. Moreover, gesture controls are themselves sensitive to, well, motion. I’ve never known an open jacket or a shirt to stay in one place perfectly as I’m moving my arm (to say nothing of weighty-thing-in-a-shirt-pocket syndrome), and that’s not even taking lighting into account; something all cameras, by virtue of their purpose, need to deal with.
That all said, its mostly hands-free offerings aren’t to be discounted. Being able to simply tap its touch pad and tell it what you want it to do could definitely be a boon when you’re driving or the like. It would not, however, be a surprise to find eventual copycats running with its concept but offloading a lot of the heavy lifting to a paired smartphone, smartwatch-style.
Regardless, most of this is conjecture, at least until more AI Pins are out in the wild. Orders for the device open up on November 16th.
Source: TechRadar
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