Humane AI Pin review: a $700 gamble
Humane’s AI Pin has been a highly anticipated, too-good-to-be-true device that promises to replace your smartphone, and now we’ve finally gotten to test it out. The Verge’s Editor-at-Large and Vergecast host, David Pierce, reviews AI Pin’s recognition and Q&A features, laser ink projector, but most of all, gets his patience tested. While the device lacked some fundamental software needs, the AI Pin is working towards something very, very cool. Just unsure how soon it'll come, if ever.
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TechTranscript
00:00 (beep)
00:01 Look at this and tell me what building it is.
00:02 (beep)
00:04 - The building is the New York Stock Exchange.
00:06 - Look at this and tell me what company it is.
00:10 (beep)
00:12 - The company is called Lyft.
00:13 (beep)
00:14 (laughing)
00:15 - Wow.
00:16 (clapping)
00:17 (laughing)
00:19 That's the best that possibly could have gone.
00:22 This thing is not going to replace your smartphone.
00:25 Not anytime soon and probably not ever.
00:28 But this thing, the Humane AI pin,
00:30 might still be in the future.
00:31 Or at least something like it might be.
00:33 I've been using this much hyped,
00:35 brand new AI gadget for a while now.
00:38 And I'm sort of impressed.
00:40 (beep)
00:40 Look at this and tell me what it is.
00:42 (beep)
00:44 (beep)
00:46 - The image contains a hand holding a green
00:49 and blue stuffed animal.
00:50 The stuffed animal is a Pokemon character named Bulbasaur.
00:54 - Bulbasaur.
00:55 That's pretty good.
00:56 And also kind of disappointed.
00:58 Email Nealai and tell him I'm missing our meeting tomorrow.
01:01 (beep)
01:03 - The email featured is not currently available.
01:05 It will be coming soon.
01:07 - And a little confused.
01:09 Play Texas Hold 'Em by Beyonce.
01:11 (beep)
01:12 - Songs not found for request.
01:14 Play Texas Hold 'Em by Beyonde\U00E9.
01:18 Try again using your actions find a relevant track,
01:21 album, artist, or playlist.
01:23 Create a new play music action
01:25 with at least one of the slots filled in.
01:27 If you find a relevant track or album, play it.
01:30 Avoid asking for clarification or what they want to hear.
01:34 - It just read me the instructions
01:35 on the backend of Humane System.
01:38 That was fantastic.
01:40 - It's all a lot.
01:41 Let's just get into it.
01:42 (upbeat music)
01:44 Okay, so what is this thing?
01:48 It's a device made entirely for interacting with AI systems.
01:52 It costs $699 and it requires a $24 a month subscription
01:56 that gets you a phone number and data for your pin
01:58 so that you can be connected at all times.
02:00 You don't use it to open apps.
02:02 You just tell it what you want and it does it.
02:04 Or at least it tries to, anyway.
02:06 Anytime you want to talk to the pin,
02:08 you just tap on the little touch pad here and talk.
02:11 There are a lot of details and things
02:12 to get into about all that, but real quick,
02:14 let me just show you some of the things it can do.
02:18 What's the weather today?
02:19 (phone beeps)
02:22 The current temperature in New York
02:25 is 48 degrees Fahrenheit with cloudy weather.
02:28 No precipitation is expected.
02:30 Text Anna, sounds good, be home in an hour.
02:33 (phone beeps)
02:36 Sending the message, sounds good,
02:39 be home in an hour to Anna Gray.
02:41 (phone beeps)
02:43 What's the name of that place in South Dakota
02:45 with all the presidents on it?
02:47 (phone beeps)
02:48 The place in South Dakota with the colossal portraits
02:51 of four outstanding presidents of the United States
02:54 is called Mount Rushmore National Memorial.
02:57 Colossal.
02:58 The big idea behind the AI pin
03:00 is that by making all this stuff so easy to access
03:04 and by abstracting away all the extra steps
03:07 of using your phone, getting it out of your pocket,
03:10 unlocking it, opening an app, logging in,
03:13 tapping around, so on and so forth,
03:15 it can give you all the information
03:17 and tools that you need without all the distraction
03:20 and hassle of a smartphone.
03:22 And there have been times in using the pin
03:24 that I have really felt that difference.
03:26 Being able to just tap my chest,
03:28 say something, and move on.
03:29 - Booster battery low.
03:31 - Yeah, you get the idea.
03:32 But there have also been times
03:35 that the pin has been a problem.
03:37 Look at this and tell me if it's good for me.
03:40 - The food analysis feature is not currently available.
03:47 - Yes it is.
03:49 Let's talk about the hardware for a second.
03:55 This is a really sturdy, nicely made device,
03:58 especially for a first gen product
03:59 from a new hardware company.
04:01 It's metallic and solid and it's definitely a little heavy,
04:04 but it's like the size and weight of an AirPods case.
04:07 It's really not that bad.
04:08 It actually attaches magnetically through your clothes
04:11 with the pin itself on the outside and this back,
04:15 which is also a battery pack on the inside.
04:18 I've been impressed with how well the magnet works
04:21 once you get it connected.
04:23 It goes through t-shirts and sweaters and even coats.
04:26 And I haven't actually had it fall off once yet,
04:29 but it does wear kind of weird.
04:30 It's heavy enough that it sort of pulls downward
04:33 on your collar.
04:34 And if you wear clothes with an open collar
04:36 or lapels or a zipper, or you just have long hair,
04:40 it all kind of gets in the way.
04:41 I've discovered after some trial and error
04:43 that the best place for it personally
04:45 is really high up on my chest,
04:47 just a few inches below my collarbone,
04:49 which helps with some of those problems,
04:51 but makes some of the other ones like long hair worse.
04:53 Oh, also the battery pack back here gets kind of hot.
04:57 I've never had it like burn me or anything,
04:59 but I definitely noticed this warm patch of skin
05:03 after I've been wearing the pin for a while.
05:05 And more than once,
05:06 I've had the pin itself actually overheat
05:08 and tell me it needs to cool off before I can use it again.
05:11 That happens like alarmingly often.
05:13 I want to get to that.
05:14 There we go.
05:14 - Your AI pin needs to cool down for a few minutes.
05:16 - Goodbye.
05:17 For me.
05:17 - Your AI pin needs to cool down for a few minutes.
05:20 - You don't have to wear it like this
05:23 to make it work, though.
05:25 You can also get this $50 magnetic clip,
05:29 which you can use to attach the pin to your waistband
05:32 or your backpack or whatever else you want.
05:34 $50 for this clip, though, is absurd.
05:37 When you buy a pin, you get the pin itself,
05:40 a charging case, two battery packs,
05:42 and this desk charger.
05:44 I do wish it also came with the clip
05:46 and this $39 magnet that is much lighter than the battery,
05:50 so it's easier to clip to some clothes.
05:52 Humane really wants you to think of this as a wearable,
05:55 but I've really liked using it
05:56 as just a little handheld gizmo.
05:59 It does feel really good to hold.
06:00 There are basically three important parts to the pin.
06:03 The first is the touchpad here.
06:05 You just press and hold every time you want to talk.
06:08 What time is it?
06:09 - 5.21 PM.
06:11 - The pin is not always listening for a wake word
06:14 or anything like that, which I really like, actually,
06:16 both for privacy and battery reasons.
06:18 There are lots of other gestures on here, too.
06:20 You swipe up and down to adjust the volume.
06:24 You double tap to take a picture.
06:26 You tap and hold with two fingers to do translation,
06:30 that sort of thing.
06:32 I found the touchpad to be kind of--
06:33 (speaking in foreign language)
06:36 Translation.
06:37 I found the touchpad to be a little finicky, though.
06:39 It doesn't always register the first time I tap it,
06:41 and then sometimes it does, but slowly,
06:44 so I tap it again before it registers,
06:45 and then it thinks I double tapped and gets confused.
06:48 But after a few days, I mostly got the hang of it.
06:51 The second important part is the laser ink display,
06:53 which is just a bunch of words to say a projector.
06:56 It's a tiny projector embedded in the pin
06:58 that shines green light onto your palm.
07:00 You can tap once to bring up the projector,
07:02 which has a home screen on which you can look
07:04 at the weather, go to settings,
07:06 or read the answer to whatever question you just asked.
07:09 The resolution on the projector is crap.
07:11 It's pretty bad in bright light, and it's all green,
07:13 so it's not like you're gonna watch movies
07:15 or really look at photos.
07:16 But like, I got nothing here.
07:18 I can see that it says a word.
07:20 If I get right up in there, that's, you know,
07:22 that's something.
07:23 But like, what is this?
07:25 What am I accomplishing here?
07:26 Oh, yay, look, I can see my TV set I look like.
07:31 It's more for when it's easier to read text
07:34 than listen to the pin speak a whole paragraph,
07:36 or if you just wanna make sure your photo
07:38 got the right thing in frame.
07:40 And look, the point of the pin is not to give you
07:42 a screen to look at anyway.
07:44 It's to help you do stuff without looking at a screen.
07:46 Using the projector is simultaneously pretty cool
07:49 and pretty annoying.
07:50 I cannot get the hang of this menu, though.
07:53 For playing music or going through the device's settings,
07:56 you're supposed to sort of roll your palm around,
07:59 and I just cannot get it to work reliably.
08:02 There's cool tech in here,
08:04 but it's not a great user experience.
08:06 The third thing about the pin is the camera.
08:08 The lens is in here, also pointing slightly downward,
08:12 which I'm told is to make it easier for it
08:14 to capture the stuff in front of you,
08:15 and not just like the sky and everybody's forehead.
08:18 You can use the camera to take pictures.
08:20 And whenever you do that, it captures three frames
08:24 and then tries to select the best one.
08:25 You can also take 15-second videos.
08:28 There we go, video.
08:31 And you can also ask the pin to make sense
08:33 of the world around you with the camera.
08:35 You just start a query with look at this and,
08:38 and ask it lots of stuff.
08:40 Look at this and tell me how many calories it has.
08:42 - LaCroix does not contain any calories.
08:47 - Does that mean it's healthy?
08:48 - The absence of calories in LaCroix
08:53 does not necessarily mean it is healthy.
08:55 It simply means that it does not contribute
08:57 to your daily calorie intake.
08:59 - That's cool, right?
09:01 When this works, this is easily the most futuristic,
09:04 AI-feeling thing about the pin.
09:07 But it doesn't work all the time.
09:08 It doesn't even work most of the time.
09:10 It feels like a total coin flip every time I try it.
09:14 Look at this and tell me if it's healthy.
09:17 - The LaCroix sparkling water and apricot flavor
09:23 is healthy with zero calories.
09:26 - One of the pin's stock responses
09:27 when it doesn't know what to do
09:29 is to tell you to use Google Lens,
09:31 which is so damning and so deeply hilarious.
09:35 I just spent $700 on this thing
09:37 that is supposed to save me from my phone,
09:39 and you're literally telling me to get my phone out.
09:42 I'm also guessing by this point that you've noticed
09:44 the pin's single biggest problem.
09:47 It is so, so slow.
09:49 Look at this and tell me what bridge I'm looking at.
09:53 (wind blowing)
09:56 - The bridge in the picture is the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge,
10:09 also known as the Triborough Bridge.
10:11 - That's definitely the Brooklyn Bridge, right?
10:14 - That's Brooklyn Bridge. - Yeah.
10:15 - Okay. - What does that mean?
10:16 - It very confidently told me it's the Triborough Bridge,
10:19 which is not the case.
10:20 This is really the thing about the pin.
10:23 I think I get what Humane is trying to do,
10:25 but this one is so far from done
10:28 that I feel like anyone who bought this thing
10:29 is being forced into a beta test against their will.
10:33 The main problem here is not the hardware,
10:35 although there are hardware problems, it's the software.
10:38 Humane has built an operating system called Cosmos
10:41 that includes a bunch of AI systems
10:43 for getting weather and the time and basic stuff like that,
10:46 and then connects to ChatGPT and a cloud of other services
10:50 to answer the rest of your questions.
10:52 It also built a tool called Humane Center,
10:54 which is what you use to manage all your photos,
10:56 connect all your contacts, and your Tidal account
10:59 because it only supports Tidal music for some reason.
11:02 For the very small handful of things it does do,
11:05 it mostly does them pretty well.
11:08 Like play music if you feel like paying for Tidal.
11:11 Play songs by the 1975.
11:13 Or texts and phone calls.
11:20 Text Viren, I'm on my way into the studio.
11:23 - There are multiple matching contacts.
11:27 Which one do you mean?
11:28 Karen Feeney, Maren Shapiro-Ager, mobile.
11:31 Maren Shapiro-Ager, home.
11:33 Vijeran Pravik.
11:35 - My boy Vijeran.
11:37 This is my point.
11:37 When I say they work pretty well,
11:39 I do only mean pretty well.
11:42 All that stuff is what I would put
11:43 in the first try category.
11:45 Stuff that's never perfect the day a new thing rolls out,
11:48 but often gets better pretty fast.
11:50 And there's a lot of that stuff on this device.
11:54 Even Humane's servers seem to be not working
11:57 about the quarter of the time that I've had this.
11:59 And for $699 and $24 a month, it needs to be finished.
12:04 But even still, there are these moments
12:06 when I do something that doesn't work,
12:08 and I'm like, "Ugh, it's gonna be so cool
12:10 "when it does work."
12:12 Remind me tomorrow to pick up the dry cleaning.
12:15 - Reminders are not currently supported.
12:17 Would you like to store this as a note?
12:19 - Sure.
12:20 - Your AI PIN cannot proceed with storing this as a note
12:24 without explicit user permission.
12:26 If you'd like to store this as a note, please let me know.
12:29 - I would like to, yes.
12:32 - Updating task.
12:35 Noted.
12:38 Will add pick up dry cleaning
12:40 to your to-do list for tomorrow.
12:42 - I want so badly for the PIN to work with to-do list apps
12:45 or calendars or Notion or basically anything
12:49 that gets my notes out of the Humane Center
12:52 and into a place I actually want to use them.
12:55 Look at this and tell me what it costs.
12:57 - The Blue Yeti microphone seen here costs $129.99.
13:03 - Where do I buy it?
13:05 That's the first time that has ever worked.
13:08 - You can purchase the Blue Yeti microphone
13:10 from various retailers, including Best Buy,
13:13 B&H Photo Video, Guitar Center, Amazon, Walmart,
13:17 Logitech G, Dell, and Sweetwater.
13:20 Prices range from $88.48 to $199.99.
13:25 - That's so funny.
13:28 That's actually exactly what I would want that thing to do.
13:30 Buy it for me from Best Buy.
13:32 Let's just see.
13:34 - Your message to Ben Strauss says,
13:37 please purchase the Blue Yeti microphone for me.
13:40 Okay to send?
13:41 - No.
13:42 No.
13:44 - What?
13:44 - Canceling.
13:47 - Oh my God.
13:48 I haven't talked to Ben Strauss since college.
13:50 Okay, that is the first time
13:52 that has ever worked almost correctly.
13:55 But in general, you can sort of see.
13:56 Wouldn't it be cool if this was connected to Amazon
13:59 or Walmart or the Google Shopping API,
14:02 and I could just see and buy something right away?
14:05 Set an alarm for 6 a.m.
14:07 - The alarm feature is not currently available.
14:12 Timers will be coming in a future software update.
14:15 - This one just needs to work.
14:18 And boy, it would be helpful if it did.
14:20 Humane has said a lot of this stuff is coming, by the way,
14:23 along with more gesture control
14:25 and a bunch of new app integrations and lots of other stuff.
14:27 They're also working on an SDK,
14:29 so theoretically anyone could make apps that run on Cosmos.
14:33 But none of that is here yet,
14:34 and I'm not betting on any of it coming soon.
14:37 In general, using this thing has made me realize, though,
14:40 how much of my phone usage is basically
14:43 this kind of one-step stuff
14:45 that my phone turns into many-step stuff
14:47 just because of the way phones work.
14:49 This is faster, except it's not because it doesn't work.
14:54 Right now, honestly, a cell-connected Apple Watch
14:57 is a much more capable and functional device than the PIN,
15:01 and that is a super low bar.
15:03 Also, the watch is cheaper, like a lot cheaper.
15:05 When Humane first started showing off the PIN
15:07 more than a year ago,
15:09 I thought the whole thing was kind of ridiculous.
15:11 It felt like a science project,
15:13 a solution to a problem that nobody has.
15:15 But I was wrong about that.
15:17 I mean, it's totally a science project,
15:19 but it is a solution to a problem
15:20 that I think everybody has.
15:22 I certainly have it.
15:24 Just over the last week or so,
15:25 I've left my phone at home a few times
15:27 and gone on walks or runs with just the PIN,
15:30 using it for music and also knowing that if I needed to,
15:33 I could make a phone call or send a text with it.
15:35 That is awesome,
15:37 except I wish it could also do step tracking
15:39 or some other kind of biometric stuff.
15:41 I guess add that to the unbelievably long list
15:44 of features I'm waiting for.
15:46 Look, the simple truth is this.
15:47 The PIN is not worth the money,
15:49 not yet and probably not anytime soon.
15:52 You definitely should not buy it
15:55 planning to replace your phone.
15:56 And really, you should only buy it
15:58 if $699 and $24 a month
16:01 feels like a reasonable price for a device
16:03 that's basically just a very early prototype
16:06 of something really cool.
16:07 But there is something really cool here.
16:09 After using the AI PIN for a while,
16:11 I'm actually more sold than ever
16:14 on the idea that AI gadgets are going to be meaningful,
16:17 that they can abstract away
16:18 some of the problems with our phones
16:20 and make it easier to get a lot of stuff done.
16:23 I'm just not sold on this device,
16:25 especially not right now,
16:26 and especially not at this price.
16:29 The AI gadgets are coming and I'm psyched about it.
16:32 I'm just not buying it yet and neither should you.
16:36 Catch me up.
16:36 - You received a missed call from David Pierce
16:41 and Anna Gray sent you two kissing face emojis.
16:44 - Peace.
16:45 - Peace.