This Artificial Smart Pin Wants to Free You From Your Phone

This Artificial Smart Pin Wants to Free You From Your Phone

The $700 Ai Pin, funded by Sam Altman and Microsoft OpenAI, can help — until it struggles with tasks like doing math and making sandwich recipes.

One recent evening, I held a bagel in front of me and said: “Look and tell me if this is healthy.”

A monotone voice replied that the bagel was unhealthy because it was high in carbohydrates, which could contribute to weight gain.

I’m not talking to tech bros who are obsessed with the ketogenic diet. This is the Ai Pin, a small $700 computer featuring a virtual assistant that pulls data from OpenAI (the research firm behind the ChatGPT chatbot), Google, Microsoft and others to answer questions and perform tasks.

Shaped like a lapel pin that might be a throwback to “Star Trek,” it attaches to your clothes with magnets and should handle tasks you’d normally do with a smartphone, like taking notes, searching the web and snapping photos. Instead of a screen, the pin shines a green laser on your hand to show text. These devices include cameras, speakers and cellular connectivity.

Ai Pin’s novel design, created by startup Humane, generated buzz when it was announced late last year. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, and companies including Microsoft and Salesforce have placed a bold bet — with $240 million in funding for Humane — that artificially intelligent hardware like the Ai Pin will be the next big thing after smartphones. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train chatbots.)

Humane says its goal with Ai Pin is to offer technology that will help people avoid screens and maintain eye contact.

I love the aesthetic and concept of stylish pins. It sometimes helps, like when it suggested items to pack for my recent trip to Hawaii. But when I wore it for two weeks, it showed significant weakness. Often, the response is nonsensical, like a bagel, or wrong, like when it says the square root of 49 is 49. Also, The Times’ shoot for Ai Pin ended prematurely when the device overheated and shut down.

I wouldn’t pay $700 for this pin — let alone the $24 a month subscription required to use its data service, including its T-Mobile cellular plan. But consider my curiosity piqued.

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, the husband-and-wife founders of Humane, who work at Apple, said the update released through its servers will address many of the glitches I’m having, including heat issues and bad math.

“It’s a journey, and we’re just at the beginning,” Ms. Bongiorno said. “The first version was not the whole vision.”

This is my experience wearing Ai Pin.

Begin
Since Ai Pin doesn’t have a screen, users set up their account and other settings on the Humane website. To unlock the device with a passcode, hold out your hand to project a green laser onto your palm. Pulling your hand out increases the number while pulling it in decreases it and you select each digit by pinching two fingers on the same hand.

The laser can be used to modify other settings, such as connecting to a Wi-Fi network, and it can show a text transcription of a virtual assistant’s answer. Humane says the laser is meant to be used for no more than nine minutes, but for me, it lasted about three before Ai Pin complained it was overheating and shut down.

Virtual Assistant
Besides unlocking pins with a laser, you’ll control Pin Ai mostly with your finger taps and voice. The advantages of pinning a virtual assistant to my shirt became apparent as I moved around and thought about the many things I had to do.

With one finger held on Ai Pin, I can call the assistant and have it add a task to my to-do list. This feature came to the fore when I was packing for my vacation to Hawaii and added items to my packing list, including T-shirts and swimming trunks. When I asked the pin to suggest other items to pack for my trip there, it recommended hats, sunscreen, and other related items. Very great.

However, Ai Pin is less helpful in some other situations. When I was in Hawaii last week, I had a hard time remembering the name of the food truck near my hotel that served loco moco, so I asked the assistant to look it up for me. It said no such food truck could be found, causing me to search on my phone.

An Interpreter
An important feature of Ai Pin is the ability to translate conversations into other languages in real time. With one finger held on the pin, I can set the language to be translated, such as Mandarin. When I put two fingers on the pin and speak a phrase in English, Ai Pin says it in Mandarin, and vice versa.

I tested this with several other languages, including Spanish, French and Indonesian. I confirmed that the interpreter was usually correct, although by switching from English to Mandarin, it mistranslated “good morning” to “da jia hao,” which means “hello, everyone.”

Did You See That?
Humane includes a feature called Vision on Ai Pin, which is labeled “beta” to signify that it’s not finished. The device uses a camera and A.I. to analyze your environment and provide information about what you see. This led to my weird experience with bagels, which got weirder the more questions I asked.

I asked the pin how to make a bagel tastier, and it proceeded to explain how to make a bagel from scratch. Finally, I asked for pins to submit suggestions for sandwiches that could be made with bagels. It came up with a long list of ideas, including chickpea salad sandwiches, sloppy Joes and cucumber sandwiches with green chutney.

On vacation, I visited a botanical garden and asked for a pin to identify flowers. “The flower is yellow with a red stripe on the inside,” the pin said. This is correct, but it doesn’t answer my question.

“It’s a Solandra maxima,” said my wife. He had taken a picture of the flower with his phone and uploaded it to Google Image search. I feel ashamed.

Humane says it’s always working to improve Vision’s features.

Phone Items
Just like a smartphone, Ai Pin has its own phone number and cellular data connection to make phone calls and play music, and its camera can be used to record photos and videos.

This is where Ai Pin especially falls short. For something designed to make you spend less time on your phone, it’s no better than a smartphone at any of those tasks. Photos and videos taken with the camera appear underlit and blurry. To make a phone call, you can ask the assistant to call someone in your address book, but to dial a new number, you specify the digit. For music, the device currently only works with Tidal, an unpopular music streaming service.

Ms Bongiorno said Ai Pin allowed her to take more vivid photos without the screen getting in the way. But for me, this is a weakness. Without a viewfinder, photos look less framed.

Anyway
While Ai Pin is sometimes useful and admirable, it’s the wrong time, unhelpful or inefficient to drive me back to my phone.

Gary Marcus, an A.I. entrepreneur, said the mistakes Ai Pin made, like with the bagels, were the result of so-called hallucinations, a tendency for A.I. to guess and make something up when it can’t find the right answer. That’s an unsolved problem in many A.I. technologies include ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Ms. Bongiorno admits that hallucinations are happening with Gemini, the technology behind Ai Pin’s Vision feature. He added that the technology will improve rapidly with user feedback and that the company has already refined the pin’s response to the bagel.

Mr. Marcus says no company yet has an A.I. technology that is sophisticated enough to make virtual assistants answer questions reliably.

“It’s almost like a watch that breaks twice a day,” he said. “It’s right sometimes, but you don’t know which part of the time, and that greatly diminishes its value.”

But there is a core idea that should be preserved. I love having a helper on my shirt when it actually helps. I’ll put my hopes on a future iteration of the product – perhaps a cheaper product that doesn’t have a camera and laser.