Humane Ai Pin Reviews Nightmare: Takeaways and Analysis
Ai Pin Reviews and Humane’s Response
Humane is a well-funded startup with excellent pedigree for modern mobile electronics; its founders and many of its key engineers previously worked on the iPhone at Apple. My analysis of the Ai Pin when it emerged from stealth was somewhat skeptical of the stand-alone product positioning, but noted that if Humane’s voice-driven, laser projection/gesture interface provided a uniquely valuable experience, the price point would not be an issue. Then, at MWC 2024, the company gave live demos inside the Qualcomm booth that showed off the promise of the concept.
Over the past week, initial Humane Ai Pin reviews were released and were so universally terrible that they generated controversy over the role of product reviewers. However, this isn’t a case of Marques Brownlee (MKBHD on YouTube) seeking to draw viewers with sensationalism by calling the Ai Pin, “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.” TheVerge’s David Pierce described it as “not even close,” and there were similar reactions from Arun Maines (Mrwhosetheboss on YouTube), CNET’s Scott Stein, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Even Michael Fisher (MrMobile on YouTube), who has been pining for a Star Trek comm badge for decades, could not recommend the product.
The company's official response has been to thank reviewers for approaching the category optimistically and emphasizing pricing and execution problems, not the concept of an AI wearable (even though some did question whether new AI wearables can exist alongside AI phones and smartwatches). Humane says that it appreciates the feedback and that it is working to add functionality and fix the problems that reviewers have pointed out. This is the best approach the company could take at this point; attacking reviewers would just make things worse. Reviewers’ responsibility is to their audience and the algorithm, not the manufacturer.
It Didn’t Have to Be This Way
Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. Launching a new company in a new category is always going to be a challenge, but Humane made things harder for itself by courting hype, over-promising, and then releasing the product well before it had a minimally viable feature set and a product that worked properly. If nothing else, the reviewers’ reactions should not have been a surprise if Humane had conducted a third-party mock review / viability process. (Full disclosure: Techsponential regularly provides this as a service. We are often asked to test products before launch under NDA and write a review for internal use that includes bugs encountered, whether the product is ready for launch, pricing, and marketing positioning recommendations. Reach out if you’d like to schedule one.)
This is not an indictment of all 1.0 products. In order to get something out the door – and get revenue flowing in – companies often have to ship something before the vision for the product is fully realized. Amazon’s Kindle Scribe launched without critical features for managing your notes, but even at launch it was a fine large format Kindle for reading, and the team at Amazon continued improving the software and it’s a much better product today. Apple launched the Apple Vision Pro without much software support, but that is growing daily, and even on day one the Apple Vision Pro offered a superior video watching experience with extensive content, along with nearly a million 2D iPad apps for productivity. That begs the question: is the problem with Humane’s Ai Pin that it shipped too soon, before it reached an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) state? Or is the problem that the AI accessory product category as a whole is doomed?
What Can Likely Be Fixed
Some of the complaints about the Ai Pin are specific to this iteration of the product that could be fixed with software updates, hardware updates, or interface tweaks:
According to all the reviewers, the Ai Pin regularly overheats.
Battery life is so poor that Humane includes multiple batteries and a portable charger in the box.
AI responses are sometimes unbearably slow.
The Pin requires frequent authentication that is difficult to enter with the projection interface.
The projection interface itself can only be used for short periods of time and gets easily washed out outdoors.
Camera output is poor, photos can be skewed depending on how the Pin is angled on your clothing, and it isn’t always obvious when taking photos what is in frame.
Doing anything with content – including sharing or posting photos – must be mediated by Humane’s website rather than an app on your phone.
Common tasks where having an AI assistant a tap away on your chest would be most useful -- like to-do entries and calendar integration – aren’t supported.
There are very few services integrated with the Ai Pin. For example, Tidal is the only music service supported.
Not all of these issues need to be fixed for the product to be successful, but all of them can be addressed with improvements to the hardware or software. Some of this is already on Humane’s roadmap, with the company promising fixes to the overheating issue, calendar integration, and an API for third party services in future software updates. Others may require new iterations of the hardware.
What Might Also Be Fixable
In the least surprising conclusion from the reviews, today’s AI provides answers that are sometimes just wrong. AI for its own sake is suspect as a value proposition today. Any product that is sold primarily for AI access needs to account for the state of the technology. This may change over time. Developers are working on ways for LLMs to internally fact check with trusted sources before responding, and AI is advancing so rapidly that it may just be a matter of time where you can ask Jarvis and trust the answer is correct. Or not. We’ll see.
Pricing is a key concern. If the price was lower, the bar for utility would be lower as well. The Ai Pin is both a relatively expensive $700 device and requires an ongoing $24/month service subscription. If the Ai Pin could replace your phone, that pricing would not be an issue, but for an accessory, at the very least it pushes it into well-heeled early adopter territory. There is also profitability to consider; Humane is a well-funded startup, but still just a startup, not a division of a company that makes billions on advertising, software, or hardware. If Humane cuts pricing to spur demand, it will have to cut deep, and then its revenue numbers won't add up for investors.
What Isn’t Going to Change
However, some of the issues that reviewers highlighted are based on Humane’s design and positioning of the Ai Pin, and these cannot be changed without altering what the Ai Pin is.
As an independent device, Humane’s Ai Pin has its own phone number and does not work with any group messaging platform such as WhatsApp or iMessage. That limits how the Ai Pin can be used for communication, and means that the AI summary “catch-up” feature misses many important notifications.
A wearable without an interactive display requires voice, and there are lots of situations where voice doesn't work (such as loud environments) or is socially inappropriate (on public transportation, in meetings, dealing with anything personal public spaces, etc.). However, a pin-style wearable simply cannot support a display directly. Smart glasses, smartwatches, or using your phone’s display are all ways around this, but then it’s not a pin anymore. This doesn’t mean that there is no market for this form factor, but the form factor does limit how many jobs the product can do. It almost demands that this form factor act not as a standalone device, but as an extension of something else: your phone.
There are many paths to get to AI, including your phone, earbuds, smart watches, smart glasses, smart cars, smart speakers, and smart appliances. However, the smartphone is the center of your digital life, and AI integration is necessarily going to have to live there. Phones are not going away. They are too useful, flexible, and deeply integrated into the digital and real world. That doesn't mean that a secondary device or a smart pin can't succeed, but it needs to piggyback on the phone and then provide use cases that the phone does not address.
There is a dangerous fallacy in the industry that takes users’ dependence on their phones and concludes not only that this is a bad thing (the research on this is inconclusive) but that the solution to this bad thing is another device that we won’t use as much. This concept that we hate being sucked into our phones is largely wrong. Microsoft tried this marketing approach for its Windows Phone. It failed. The fact is: smartphones are marvelous! People use them – and overuse them – because they are so compelling and fill so many roles in our lives. A 6" app-driven connected piece of glass with a touch interface is incredibly versatile and useful and connected and entertaining. No technology available today – or on any five year roadmap I have seen – can replace the smartphone. This does not mean that we should ignore the downsides of being constantly connected, of dark patterns in user interfaces, or the dangers of giving over so much of our attention to these devices. It does mean that creating purposely less-engaging alternatives to wildly compelling smartphones will find a limited market.
When Humane first announced the Ai Pin it positioned it as a phone substitute. It is now walking that back somewhat, noting that of course you will still need a phone for social media and banking and browsing photos. However, the Ai Pin was clearly designed to work entirely independently from your phone. Humane cannot easily pivot the Ai Pin into a phone-based accessory without rearchitecting its software and connectivity model from the ground up. It's not as simple as writing an app and dropping the subscription fee. I expect Humane to iterate on its current design, make improvements where it can, and see if there is a market for a not-fully-integrated AI assistant. If Humane can get the Ai Pin to a point where it doesn’t overheat, handles a few core use cases well, and answers genAI questions quickly and accurately, I would love to test it.
What About Rabbit R1 and T-Mobile AI Phone?
Rabbit is another startup with an AI device, and it is expected to ship shortly. Reviews of the Rabbit R1 are likely going to be better than the Humane Ai Pin if only because the Rabbit R1 is being pitched as an accessory, not a phone replacement. All the R1 has to do is be better than the AI that’s on your phone. The cost structure, at $200 with no subscription, is also low enough that it can be justified as an early adopter impulse buy, though I do not understand Rabbit’s economics (i.e., how it is paying for hardware development and server time with that one-time $200).
However, in some ways, Rabbit is even more ambitious than Humane, with its goal not just to run LLM queries, but to use AI to manage multiple services on behalf of the user. If this LAM (Large Action Model) proves both possible and useful, that could easily justify carrying a separate device. It will also ensure competition from Google, Apple, and Samsung who will be motivated to integrate this functionality into their phones. If it doesn’t work, reviews of the Rabbit R1 will note that a cheaper paperweight is still a paperweight.
Another startup, Brain.ai, has partnered with Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile to integrate its own LAM capabilities into smartphones. This was presented as a concept AI device at MWC 2024, though it appeared to be less conceptual and more of an early look at the next generation T-Mobile REVVL phone, only with Brain.ai replacing Google Search from the home page. This certainly has the potential to be a success, though the single-carrier nature and low-end nature of the REVVL brand is a limiting factor. As noted above, I expect that we will see more of this type of integration going forward from the operating system vendors themselves, so Brain.ai will need to stay far enough ahead of Google and Apple’s own efforts to justify OEMs working with them.
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