David Pierce Reviews Humane’s AI Pin: ‘Nope. Nuh-Uh. No Way.’
David Pierce, mincing no words at The Verge:
That raises the second question: should you buy this thing? That
one’s easy. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. The AI Pin is an interesting
idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so
many unacceptable ways that I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d
recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly
subscription. […]
As the overall state of AI improves, the AI Pin will probably get
better, and I’m bullish on AI’s long-term ability to do a lot of
fiddly things on our behalf. But there are too many basic things
it can’t do, too many things it doesn’t do well enough, and too
many things it does well but only sometimes that I’m hard-pressed
to name a single thing it’s genuinely good at. None of this — not
the hardware, not the software, not even GPT-4 — is ready yet.
Ever since Humane de-stealthed and revealed the AI Pin last July, the big question (for me at least) has been whether it’d actually be useful to own a gadget that does what the AI Pin is supposed to do. It’s seemed to me all along that almost everything the AI Pin does would be just as well, if not better, done by a phone with an LLM-powered voice assistant. But Humane has far bigger problems, because the AI Pin clearly doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to. Pierce:
I’d estimate that half the time I tried to call someone, it simply
didn’t call. Half the time someone called me, the AI Pin would
kick it straight to voicemail without even ringing. After many
days of testing, the one and only thing I can truly rely on the AI
Pin to do is tell me the time.
The more I tested the AI Pin, the more it felt like the device was
trying to do an awful lot and the hardware simply couldn’t keep
up. For one, it’s pretty much constantly warm. In my testing, it
never got truly painfully hot, but after even a few minutes of
using it, I could feel the battery like a hand warmer against my
skin. Bongiorno says the warmth can come from overuse or when you
have a bad signal and that the device is aggressive about shutting
down when it gets too hot. I’ve noticed: I use the AI Pin for more
than a couple of minutes, and I get notified that it has
overheated and needs to cool down. This happened a lot in my
testing (including on a spring weekend in DC and in 40-degree New
York City, where it was the only warm thing in sight).
The battery life is similarly rough.
Pierce’s review is so brutal it’s uncomfortable at times. I don’t know where Humane goes from here but this might be impossible to recover from reputationally. It seems borderline criminal that they shipped it in this state. Here’s one more tidbit:
Me: “Play ‘Texas Hold ’Em’ by Beyoncé.”
The AI Pin: “Songs not found for request: Play Texas Hold ’Em by
Beyoncu00e9. Try again using your actions find a relevant track,
album, artist, or playlist; Create a new PlayMusic action with at
least one of the slots filled in. If you find a relevant track or
album play it, avoid asking for clarification or what they want
to hear.”
That’s a real exchange I had, multiple times, over multiple days
with the AI Pin.
I thought perhaps the “u00e9” thing was a CMS glitch, but no — watch Pierce’s corresponding video review and you’ll hear the AI Pin pronounce “Beyoncé” as “beeyonk-backslash-you-zero-zero-ee-nine”.
(Yet, somehow, the AI Pin garnered a 4/10 on The Verge’s review scale. How bad, how broken, would a product experience have to be to get a lower score? Would the reviewer need to be electrocuted by the device to rate it lower? “3/10, sent me to the ER with a nasty burn”? “1/10, it killed my spouse when she tried it”?)
★
David Pierce, mincing no words at The Verge:
That raises the second question: should you buy this thing? That
one’s easy. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. The AI Pin is an interesting
idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so
many unacceptable ways that I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d
recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly
subscription. […]
As the overall state of AI improves, the AI Pin will probably get
better, and I’m bullish on AI’s long-term ability to do a lot of
fiddly things on our behalf. But there are too many basic things
it can’t do, too many things it doesn’t do well enough, and too
many things it does well but only sometimes that I’m hard-pressed
to name a single thing it’s genuinely good at. None of this — not
the hardware, not the software, not even GPT-4 — is ready yet.
Ever since Humane de-stealthed and revealed the AI Pin last July, the big question (for me at least) has been whether it’d actually be useful to own a gadget that does what the AI Pin is supposed to do. It’s seemed to me all along that almost everything the AI Pin does would be just as well, if not better, done by a phone with an LLM-powered voice assistant. But Humane has far bigger problems, because the AI Pin clearly doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to. Pierce:
I’d estimate that half the time I tried to call someone, it simply
didn’t call. Half the time someone called me, the AI Pin would
kick it straight to voicemail without even ringing. After many
days of testing, the one and only thing I can truly rely on the AI
Pin to do is tell me the time.
The more I tested the AI Pin, the more it felt like the device was
trying to do an awful lot and the hardware simply couldn’t keep
up. For one, it’s pretty much constantly warm. In my testing, it
never got truly painfully hot, but after even a few minutes of
using it, I could feel the battery like a hand warmer against my
skin. Bongiorno says the warmth can come from overuse or when you
have a bad signal and that the device is aggressive about shutting
down when it gets too hot. I’ve noticed: I use the AI Pin for more
than a couple of minutes, and I get notified that it has
overheated and needs to cool down. This happened a lot in my
testing (including on a spring weekend in DC and in 40-degree New
York City, where it was the only warm thing in sight).
The battery life is similarly rough.
Pierce’s review is so brutal it’s uncomfortable at times. I don’t know where Humane goes from here but this might be impossible to recover from reputationally. It seems borderline criminal that they shipped it in this state. Here’s one more tidbit:
Me: “Play ‘Texas Hold ’Em’ by Beyoncé.”
The AI Pin: “Songs not found for request: Play Texas Hold ’Em by
Beyoncu00e9. Try again using your actions find a relevant track,
album, artist, or playlist; Create a new PlayMusic action with at
least one of the slots filled in. If you find a relevant track or
album play it, avoid asking for clarification or what they want
to hear.”
That’s a real exchange I had, multiple times, over multiple days
with the AI Pin.
I thought perhaps the “u00e9” thing was a CMS glitch, but no — watch Pierce’s corresponding video review and you’ll hear the AI Pin pronounce “Beyoncé” as “beeyonk-backslash-you-zero-zero-ee-nine”.
(Yet, somehow, the AI Pin garnered a 4/10 on The Verge’s review scale. How bad, how broken, would a product experience have to be to get a lower score? Would the reviewer need to be electrocuted by the device to rate it lower? “3/10, sent me to the ER with a nasty burn”? “1/10, it killed my spouse when she tried it”?)