The gadget goes on sale this November from a thousand dollars the ‘wereable’ device aims to eradicate dependence on screens. ‘Time’ magazine has distinguished this AI support as the best invention of the year.
Anyone who thinks that everything has already been invented does not know the human condition nor can they imagine the possibilities of the ‘Humane Ai Pin’. Ask Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, main executives of Humane.inc, possibly the most seductive startup in the world, thanks to the invention of a small device, considered by ‘Time’ magazine as the best invention of 2023 and that It comes to the market with a price close to a thousand dollars (943 euros). Despite this, the waiting list of interested parties is already smoking on the company’s website.
The ‘Humane Ai Pin’, remember that name, is a small magnetic pendant that must be placed on the front of your shirt or on the lapel of your jacket, as if it were a badge or the metal shield of the football team. Broadly speaking, the gadget consists of three main elements: a laser projector, to turn the palm of the hand, a table, the back seat of a vehicle or any other nearby surface into a screen; a microphone with a 360-degree camera, equipped with dozens of microsensors; and a Qualcomm superchip, to connect via the Internet with the artificial intelligence servers of the most advanced versions of Chat GPT. The entire assembly is integrated into a small housing the size of your thumb.
But before moving forward with the gadget, it is worth looking back at its inventors. The aforementioned couple, husband and wife, tired long ago of the enslaving dependence on the screen. Said and done, they left the job they shared at Apple and began designing five years ago a gadget capable of killing the smartphone… but without giving up its features. She was director of iOS software engineering and mother of the first iPad and he had 20 years of creating patents for the apple company, including the gesture of sliding a finger up on the iPhone screen to exit applications.
With the conviction that artificial intelligence is the best weapon to retire mobile phones and their illuminated panels, Humane.inc has raised more than 230 million dollars, the last one hundred million last spring. Its mission is to “deliver the next era of personal mobile computing” and with this objective it has earned the enthusiastic support of investors such as Sam Altman, founder of Open Ai (company that owns Chat GPT) and Hico Capital (US investment arm from SK Networks). The previous ones attracted other technology giants to the company such as Qualcomm, Microsoft, the Volvo automobile company, LG Technology and funds Top Tier Capital, Hudson Bay Capital, Socium Ventures, Kindred Ventures Tiger Global, Valia Ventures, Forerunner Ventures and Lachy Groom, among other references.
Those interested in the matter can check out the TED Talk starring Imran Chaudhri on YouTube where he gives a captivating demonstration of the device’s abilities. For example, he translates voice into any language, with the tone, intonation and voice nuances of the user’s original speech. It also replicates the tasks that a conventional AI assistant can perform, in addition to those of connectivity, messaging and email services. But all this without the need for a smartphone and its toxic screen, because that is Humane’s great crusade.
Next, Chaudhri describes his wearable as “a new type of device, whose platform is built entirely from scratch for artificial intelligence and completely independent, so it does not need to be linked or paired to a mobile phone, with the advantage that it interacts with the world the same way you interact with the world. Hearing what you hear, seeing what you see, and protecting privacy and security.” For the latter, the ‘Humane Ai Pin’ has a reliable light, which turns on and reveals when it is recording images or sound.”
The discreet gadget promises to take artificial intelligence everywhere to use it only when it is really necessary. As Chaudhri explains, the “experience is fluid and screen-free, allowing you to access computing power without losing sight of your surroundings, taking the power of AI with you everywhere.” The best thing about invention is making technology invisible when it is not necessary, when it is convenient to look at people or the landscape instead of gawking at a screen. Therefore, ‘Humane Ai Pin’ offers “opportunities to interact with computing in a natural way, which we are not so used to, without pressing an application or moving the cursor with the mouse, so the future driven by AI is a lot better than the present one, since it doesn’t need screens.” In his opinion, “invisible devices should be so easy to use that you almost forget about their existence.”
AI and machine learning of the user’s coexistence and environment allows the system to enrich its operations and features, so that “the whole world becomes your operating system and when computing disappears, it allows us to return to what really matters , real life, like enjoying a concert without having to hold your phone to record it or experiencing your child’s first steps without a screen getting between you and him.” In this way, “in the future, technology will be both environmental and contextual. And this means taking advantage of artificial intelligence to understand you and your environment in order to obtain the best results,” preaches the proud inventor of it.
Chaudhri: “We are only beginning to scratch the surface of AI capabilities, with a device built to disappear”.
With this ‘Humane Ai Pin’, as Chaudhri concludes in the same TED Talk, “we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the capabilities of AI, with a device built to disappear and allow experiences to present themselves, so we open new ways of interacting with technology and the world around us.
For his part, Ziad Asghar, vice president responsible for product management at Qualcomm Technologies, believes that “the Ai Pin will offer a superior Artificial Intelligence experience. With the arrival of Generative Artificial Intelligence, the Humane Ai Pin and the user experience They excellently leverage some of the strengths of AI on devices and use real-time contextual information to deliver exciting, personalized AI use cases to the user. We share Humane’s vision of bringing artificial intelligence everywhere and putting it within everyone’s reach. We can’t wait to see where they take this device,” according to a Humane corporate document.
