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From the “I hate this but people are going to buy it, aren’t they??” Department: Well it’s not quite Samantha from the movie Her, but that’s definitely seeming like it was an inspiration. A suddenly AI-based product company that’s ironically called Humane is on the verge of releasing … a thing.
The thing is called the AI Pin, and the idea seems to be a wearable smartphone without all the inconvenience of text, silent usage, or a screen. That’s right, folks, for a mere $699 starting (plus $24 subscription), you can have about a 2-inch square hanging magnetically from your lapel, that you can yell at like a Siri you for some reason brought to the grocery store.
This thing is supposed to be fully standalone- Humane insists that the Pin will not need pairing with anything else. In addition to the obviously always-on listening microphone that apparently we as a society will just have to get used to, the Pin boasts a simple laser output to broadcast text onto your hand or I suppose blind passersby, as well as a camera for added creepiness.
To be fair, it also has a touchpad, so I guess you can pretend you’re in Star Trek to activate, and a “Trust Light,” which will light up when it’s recording. Surely that won’t be easily bypassed and used ASAP by creepers. It’s also got motion sensors so it understands itself moving in space, and a built-in speaker to annoy the shit out of anyone nearby.
It does have a hot-swappable battery system, which is 1) super cool as a concept, and 2) obviously going to be extremely necessary for a device this small. The Pin is gonna of course be built into the OpenAI GPT ecosystem so the usage will evolve overtime, but basically think of it like an omnipresent, confidently incorrect, privacy-invading, personal assistant. Or a miniaturized white dude in their 20s.