Humane, the hotly-hyped up consumer device startup-up helmed by former Apple executives finally has a name for its illusive AI-enabled wearable device. The pocket-sized product, which was spotted nestled in an executive’s front pocket during a presentation earlier this year, is called the Humane Ai Pin. Whether or not it’s the “iPhone killer” some have called it, or even a functioning device, still remains to be seen. It’s supposed to launch “late this year.”
Humane revealed the name of the forthcoming device in a blog post, describing it as a “standalone device with a software platform that harnesses the power of AI to enable innovative personal computing experiences.” If that sounds somewhat vague, it’s because it is. A video presentation of the purported device earlier this year provided a bit more clarity and showed off what looked like an AirPod case-sized screenless device performing various AI-assistant tasks.
“Our Ai Pin presents an opportunity for people to take AI with them everywhere and to unlock a new era of personal mobile computing which is seamless, screenless and sensing,” Humane co-founders and former Apple executives Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno said in a joint statement.
Humane provided a few more details about the tech it plans to shove into its clothing-based wearable in its blog post. The Humane Ai Pin will rely on a variety of sensors that enable “contextual and ambient compute interactions.” To achieve that, Humane is partnering with legacy chip-making giant Qualcomm for the chips that power the device. Though details about the types of Qualcomm chips being used in the device remain sparse, Qualcomm Senior Vice President of Product Management Ziad Asghar claimed Humane’s new device “takes excellent advantage of some of the key strengths of on-device AI and uses real-time contextual information.”
Humane and Qualcomm did not immediately respond to Gizmood’s request for comment.
“Its [the Ai Pin] revolutionary and sleek form factor is packed with powerful performance so that it can make sense of real-time contextual information and provide the wearer with a new and exciting experience,” Qualcomm Vice President of Business Development Dev Singh, added. “We cannot wait to see where they take this device.”
What is Humane, anyways?
It’s difficult to imagine a project more tailor-made to get the tech internet salivating than a startup run by two former Apple executives working to create a slick ambitious, new consumer-tech product. In this case, the Apple turncoats are husband-wife duo Chaudhri and Bongiorno who worked as the tech giant’s director of design and software engineering respectively. Chaudhri spent part of his 20 years at Apple helping create some of the company’s biggest household name hits like the iPad, Apple Watch, and, of course, the iPhone. Bongiorno led teams that designed the operating systems used in devices.
Since its founding in 2017, Humane has been shrouded in secrecy and only just recently presented a demo giving the public some semblance of an idea of what it’s actually working on. Still, despite that mystery, or maybe because of it, the team at Humane has received buckets of money from leading tech investors. Humane recently announced an eye-grabbing $US100 million investment round which included funds from Microsoft, and Open AI CEO Sam Altman. The company said it would also work with OpenAI to integrate its AI into the eventual Humane product. That influx of capital came on the heels of two prior investment rounds reportedly totaling around $US130 million. Now Humane, which has yet to release a project, is reportedly worth nearly half a billion dollars.
Humane demo attracted tech die-hards and sceptics
Humane offered the general public its first glimpse into its Ai Pin device during a TED presentation earlier this year which was met with equal parts gushing admiration and eye-brow-curling scepticism. The demo purportedly showed Chaudhri walking around with the device nestled in his front breast pocket. He supposedly used it to translate his voice into French in real-time, answer a phone call, catch him up on the day ahead, and scan the nutritional contents of a candy bar. All of those functions, Chaudhri claimed, were performed nearly instantaneously using AI without needing to pair up with another device.
The @Humane wearable doing English->French AI translation in your own voice… wow. (SOUND ON)
Video credit @ZarifAli9
Read the exclusive on the Humane wearable’s features: https://t.co/TYRmtYPSYI pic.twitter.com/cmAWEU8DFS
— Ray Wong (@raywongy) April 21, 2023
First public call on a @humane device, with audio! pic.twitter.com/nDaiFlAjMt
— Michael Mofina (@MichaelMofina) April 21, 2023
Critics of the presentation, however, were left with more answers than questions. How, for example, did the device know how to translate Chaudhri’s voice into French without him first telling it to? Other observers were similarly confused about how a deceive seemingly linked up with Chaudhri’s calendar and health information could have access to that data without first connecting to an iPhone or other personal device. Maybe most importantly, the demo left unclear how anyone without a front pocket is supposed to wield the device in the first place. Headstap? Selfie stick? Utility belt? We simply don’t know. In the end, the demo, if it can be called that, wasn’t quite the equivalent of Tesla CEO Elon Musk ushering out a dancing man Spandex to reveal his human supposed humanoid Tesla Bot, but it certainly felt in the ballpark.
Whether or not Human’s AI Pin actually ships “later this year” as promised is really beside the point. As Musk’s now comically missed launch targets and deadlines for Tesla and SpaceX projects and the always just-around-the-corner but never-quite-there-yet promise of flying cars proves time and again, a sense of immediacy can effectively drive hype and with it, investment. Humane has plenty of both of those right now and with everyone from talking toilet makers to dildo manufacturers racing to incorporate AI into their products, Humane finds itself nestled in a perfect period to drive up even more excitement hype for its totally, probably, almost surely real AI iPhone killer. Just like Singh of Qualcomm above, we similarly “cannot wait to see where they take this device.”