The First AI Gadgets Are a Cautionary Tale

The sudden explosion of AI products has been, for the most part, a story told through software. Consumer AI is all about chatbots, media generators, plug-ins, and new features installed into apps that people already use. Over the past year, though, start-ups and bigger tech firms have been trying to figure out what an AI device might look like, and the first few attempts are hitting the market. There are the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which use AI for voice commands as well as translation and object recognition, available since late last year. There are the Brilliant smart glasses, which claim to tap into AI services to let wearers “receive answers to questions about what you’re currently looking at, experience live translation from either speech or text, and query the internet real-time, shipping imminently.” There’s the Rabbit R1, a small MP3-player-ish device that’s intended to function, through its scroll wheel, camera, and voice control, as a “universal controller for apps” on your phone. Apple’s former design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI are reportedly raising funds to create an “iPhone of artificial intelligence,” whatever that might mean.

Then there’s the Humane AI Pin, a clip that snaps onto your shirt with a magnet. It’s got a camera, a microphone, a speaker, and a small projector that throws a gesture interface on your palm, for an alternative to voice commands. Along with the Rabbit, it’s an interesting and novel piece of hardware, a device with no obvious precedent in consumer electronics and a number of thoughtful new features and design elements, suggesting the arrival of what David Pierce at the Verge describes as the “AI hardware revolution” — a period in which companies are designing consumer technology around a new set of assumptions about what computers can do. Humane’s AI Pin, which has its own wireless connection and doesn’t interact with users’ other devices, is a bet that, in the chatbot era, people might want to get rid of their smartphones altogether. It’s the most ambitious gadget of its kind, with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and support from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and also one of the first to market. How is it?

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Not great. Reviewers........

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