This is cool, it's a nicer abstraction than what the Google Glasses & then Meta Glasses tried to go for...but it's still a pin I have to wear on my shirt which is stopping me from adopting.
At least for me it's very common to have several layers of clothing on most days. It would be hassle to attach this from outer jacket to shirt when moving from outside to inside.
Biggest issue is that people hate talking to computers in public.
Alexa was the closest to achieve significant usage since you can use it within the privacy of your home.
For voice UIs the non clear boundaries on what you think it can or cannot do is also a huge hurdle. After you get a couple “sorry I cannot do that” you stop using it
I agree, BUT, i think it's going to get a lot better soon. Ie i loathe Siri because it felt like there was always some incantation i had to remember. Like a very terrible CLI. LLMs though, even if we never get intelligence right, i think can help this area significantly.
Combine that with areas like GPT Vision, (GPT?) Whisper, etc .. it'll start feeling a lot more natural here very soon i suspect.
TBH i'm surprised Apple isn't pushing this much harder. They tout Siri so hard but it's just worthless to me. It feels like apple could make a AI Pin like this, but visibly from the public side i have zero idea that the're even working in this space. It feels like they purposefully watched the boat sail away.
edit: Sidenote, Pin + Airpods would be a nice way to interface more quietly too.
The Google assistant has been years ahead of Siri and Alexa for a good while now. I've been able to give it really loose sloppy commands, even stuttering or backtracking on my sentences, and does a competent job of figuring out what I want. In my experience Siri is much more dependent on keywords and certain phrasing, and doesn't quite integrate as deeply into one's life because Apple isn't doesn't play Google's game of slurping up all your personal data and all the public data on the internet.
These next gen AI voice assistants are still a solid improvement over Google's current offerings, but they'll feel like a massive jump into the future for folks that have been stuck in Apple's ecosystem, and that's probably where the biggest opportunity lies.
Yeah, unless the utility of this devices is large enough to override existing cultural norms, there's actually very few venues where it feels "comfortable" to voice interact with a device.
I went through this exercise with GPT voice. It's an awesome capability, but other than perhaps walking outside, or sitting in my office, there's no other space where it feels "ok" to just spontaneously talk to something.
A grey area is when you perhaps have headphones in / on and it looks like you're in a phone conversation with somebody, then it kinda feels ok, but generally you're not going to take a phone conversation in a public area without distancing yourself from others.
There's a reason most casual communication these days is text rather than voice or video calls.
The weirdness is caused by the incantation all these things have. Once you can just talk to the AI without doing anything, just talk to it, it'll catch on very easily.
This fortunately is a solved problem. Or will be, once Amazon, Apple and Google get out of their asses and plug a better voice recognition model to an LLM.
Silly how OpenAI could blow all voice assistants out of the water today, if they just added Android intents as function calls to the ChatGPT app. Yes, the "voice chat mode" is that good.
I know i'm getting close to Torment Nexus territory but how do you get an LLM to run code as the response? Given that an LLM basically calculates the most probable text that follows a prompt, how do you then go from that response to a function call that flips a lightswitch? Seems like you'd need some other ML/AI that takes the LLM output and figures out it most likely means a certain call to an API and then executes that call.
With alexa i can program if/then statements, like basically when i say X then do Y. If something like chatgpt requires the same thing then i don't see the advantage.
> If something like chatgpt requires the same thing then i don't see the advantage.
So LLMs today can do this a few ways. One they can write and execute code. You can ask for some complex math (eg calculate the tip for this bill), and the LLM can respond with a python program to execute that math, then the wrapping program can execute this and return the result. You can scale this up a bit, use your creativity at the possiblities (eg SQL queries, one-off UIs, etc).
You can also use an LLM to “craft a call to an API from <api library>”. Today, Alexa basically works by calling an API. You get a weather api, a timer api, etc and make them all conform to the Alexa standard. An LLM can one-up it by using any existing API unchanged, as long as there’s adequate documentation somewhere for the LLM.
An LLM won’t revolutionize Alexa type use cases, but it will give it a way to reach the “long tail” of APIs and data retrieval. LLMs are pretty novel for the “write custom code to solve this unique problem” use case.
Yup, from where I see it, the only thing(s) holding llms back from generating api calls on the fly in a voice chat scenario is probably latency (and to a lesser degree malformed output)
Yea, the latency is absolutely killing a lot of this. Alexa first-party APIs of course are tuned, and reside in the same datacenter, so its fast, but a west-coast US LLM trying to control a Philips Hue will discover they're crossing the Atlantic for their calls, which probably would compete with an LLM for how slow it can be.
> and to a lesser degree malformed output
What's cool, is that this isn't a huge issue. Most LLMs how have "grammar" controls, where the model doesn't select any character as the next one, it selects the highest-probability character that conforms to the grammar. This dramatically helps things like well-formed JSON (or XML or... ) output.
Disagree. Extra latency of adding LLMs to a voice pipeline is not that much compared to doing voice via cloud in the first place. Improved accuracy and handling of natural language queries would be worth it relative to the barely-working "assistants" that people only ever use to set timers, and they can't even handle that correctly half the time.
> With alexa i can program if/then statements, like basically when i say X then do Y. If something like chatgpt requires the same thing then i don't see the advantage.
Yes, I was thinking about even something as if/then, which could be configured in the UI and manifest to GPT-4 as the usual function call stuff.
The advantage here would be twofold:
1. GPT-4 won't need you to talk a weird command language; it's quite good at understanding regular talk and turning it into structured data. It will have no problem understanding things like "oh flip the lights in the living room and run some music, idk, maybe some Beatles", followed by "nah, too bright, tone it down a little", and reliably converting them into data you could feed to your if/else logic.
2. ChatGPT (the app) has a voice recognition model that, unlike Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa, does not suck. It's the first model I've experienced that can convert my casual speech into text with 95%+ accuracy even with lots of ambient noise.
Those are the features ChatGPT app offers today. Right now, if they added a basic bidirectional Tasker integration (user-configurable "function calls" emitting structured data for Tasker, and ability for Tasker to add messages into chat), anyone could quickly DIY something 20x better than Google Assistant.
At some point you've got to get from language to action, yes - in my case, I use the LLM as a multi-stage classifier, mapping from a set of high-level areas of capability, to more focused mappings to specific systems and capabilities. So the first layer of classification might say something like "this interaction was about <environmental control>" where <environmental control> is one of a finite set of possible systems. The next layer might say something like "this is about <lighting>", and the next layer may now have enough information to interrogate using a specific enough prompt (which may be generated based on a capability definition, so for example "determine any physical location, an action, and any inputs regarding colour or brightness from the following input" - which can be generated from the possible inputs of the capability you think you're addressing).
Of course this isn't fool proof, and there still needs to be work defining capabilities of systems, etc. (although these are tasks AI can assist with). But it's promising - "teaching" the system how to do new things is relatively simple, and effectively akin to describing capabilities rather than programming directly.
The basic idea is to instruct the llm to output some kind of signal in text (often a json blob) that describes what it should do, then have a normal program use that json to execute some function.
ChatGPT's voice bot vs. PI's voice bot is lacking in Pi's personality and zing. PI is completely free and Ive been using it since beginning of October. Chat GPT's i have to pay $20 and for a lesser voice (personality / tone of voice is more monotone) bot.
It's staggering to me that Apple has not improved on the UI for "try again" or "keep trying", whether the fault is with Siri itself, or just network conditions. It seems like (relatively) low-hanging fruit, compared to the challenges of improving the engine. (I don't use any other voice assistants, no idea how well they do here.)
If I want to ask ChatGPT about something I will, and the speech-to-text is a lot faster than typing on my phone. There's no voice incantation needed, rather a button press, but people still raise their eyebrows and make me feel self-conscious. I wish I could subvocalize to it like I remember reading about in the book series Artemis Fowl.
> it looks like you're in a phone conversation with somebody
Even though everyone's seen AirPods by now, in those rare occasions when I'm on the phone in public, I feel compelled to have my phone out and vaguely talking at it, so it's clear I'm on a phone call and not a crazy person.
I'm curious if we would see similar usage with the pin, where voice commands in public are always performed with the hand up for the projection screen (it will still prompt looks, but hopefully be clear in context, "oh they're doing some tech thing").
Of course at this price point, it's highly dubious that we'll see anywhere near the ubiquitous market penetration of AirPods (which garner understandable complaints about the price point sub-$200, and that's with a clear value prop).
I don't mind the earphones, but often headsets are entirely impractical. Most notably, in the case of any sort of weather, wind, etc. A phone can also get rained on, but its a bit easier to keep safe.
The other reason they are mostly impractical - keeping a charge. *wired* headsets were great in this regard, but then there's the wire, and now, there's the phone (that may not even support the wire?).
same with swiftkey - can handle whispered speech to some extend.
Still I would guess Meta Glasses or AirPods should be better to handle such whispered mode since microphones are so much closer. Would be interesting if Airpods had some contact mic that could pickup whispered sound inside your mouth.
Maybe the holly grail is to have something inside your mouth so you don't have to even make voice - device will figure out what you want to speak from how mouth and tongue movement - smart tooth braces anyone? :)
Agreed. I have the new Meta Ray-Ban glasses, and have been pleasantly surprised with how soft I can speak since the mics are so close to my mouth, but still don't enjoy doing it in public.
The only reason people don't like talking to computers in public is that it's distinguishable in an awkward way from talking to humans in public. That's not going to be an issue for much longer. ChatGPT voice mode is about 99% of the way there. The only remaining issue is the cadence of the conversation -- you can't interrupt ChatGPT naturally, you have to press a button.
The issue is that your private communications are now audible by the people around you. It’s one thing when it’s to another person and you can whisper and share social context, it’s another when it’s at a good volume and contextless.
These don't seem like real issues to me. They are the exact same issues you have when you are talking to humans. And the way we solve that issue with humans is that we only have conversations around other humans that we are comfortable having. We save sensitive conversations for when we are not in public.
The issues isn’t “communicating with the device” it’s “communicating around other people”.
I have almost negative interest in having to recite the technical specifics of my web search to my phone on the train to work. I have even less interest in having to listen to the person next to me trying to do the same.
Typing already allows sensitive conversations with computers in public as long as no one is directly peeking at your screen. When I talk to humans in public, I'm not using them as an utility tool to manage information for me, because computers do a better job. These aren't comparable scenarios.
> The only reason people don't like talking to computers in public is that ...
It does not seem right to speak of a single reason. There are probably multiple. So, IMHO it would be more productive to come up with a list and put some weights on the options if you want to dissect this matter.
IMHO one very strong factor / important reason (one that you ignore) is the social context. Ie the reaction of others in the same physical space, as you start talking out loud, seemingly unmotivated.
Humans are social animals, and so the reaction of others to the actions you do tend to be very important to a large fraction of the population. What is acceptable in one context simply isn't in another. Also, the exact tolerances tend to differ with the local culture (here "local" is used in the sense "geographically/physically local")
It's not just about not annoying others here. In this case it's also about a thing as imprecise as "perceived self image". Some people (I'd argue, most people) dislike having the perception that others perceive them to be mentally unstable or rude. Most people need some kind of social acceptance for the actions they do.
One significant trait of some mental instabilities (as well as some drug induced behavioral changes) is that those affected will spontanously start talking in public. You will probably know the Tourettes Syndrome, and the alchoholic rambling about because these cases often imply quite rude and offensive verbiage and/or loud volume, but these are not the only cases.
People in general are well adept at detecting such anomalous behaviour as it is part of our insticts trained through Evolution. Also the uncomfortable feelings that observing this type of behaviour leads to will lead many to react with a "confront or escape" (aka. "fight or flee") response (a stress signal), which is not beneficial to social interaction in general.
TL;DR: If you speak out in public without a very clear and socially valid reason (speaking to an object is not that) you are not only rude to others, but you also cause them stress... and you will have to face the social stigma of being perceived as insane.
I've been thinking about this recently. A colleague is participating in a group call and talking to someone I can't hear or see and that's just background noise to me, I can easily tune that out. Another person tends to vocalize his thought process sometimes and it steals my attention in a hard-to-explain unpleasant way every time.
> TL;DR: If you speak out in public without a very clear and socially valid reason (speaking to an object is not that) you are not only rude to others, but you also cause them stress... and you will have to face the social stigma of being perceived as insane.
Except... this problem is known to be trivially solvable. After all, the very act of putting a flat rectangle to your ear makes talking out loud in public not just perfectly acceptable, but mundane and not worth paying attention to (subject to social norms dictating where it is or isn't OK to be on the phone).
As for talking to yourself signalling insanity... I'd hope that stupid and probably developmentally retarding idea died long ago, and the "talking to yourself out loud in public" subtrope being dead since wireless earphones got ubiquitous some two decades ago.
The modern reality is, hearing someone "talking to themselves" is normal, and 99.9% of times means they're on a call.
The point is it's not, though. As a society we have generally established that it is rude to be speaking out loud on the phone in public. Especially on the bus or the train or waiting for same or in the shop or at a movie or any number of other places. I genuinely think it would be easier instead to list the places where it would be okay (in a busy street, if you step to one side). Even in these places there is some expectation that you show a little shame to be doing it, as though you didnt want to but had to because the call is important
The can and cannot do problem reminds me of writing Applescript. I just want to call a function not figure out where to sprinkle in random a/the/of modifiers!
How well does whispering do with these things? I've found that I can reliably write sentences and set alerts when holding the mic fairly close on my Pixel 6.
If people can speak more naturally, maybe they'll be okay with it. I am constantly encountering people who are laughing or talking to themselves out in public nowadays. Of course, they're probably on phone calls with Airpods in, but it doesn't seem to be awkward in a way it used to in the 'Bluetooth headset' days.
Well, I hated talking to Siri in public because about 70% of the time it did what I want and 30% of the time it made me feel like a fool for even trying. That 30% was what killed it for me after giving it a serious go around the time Apple was rolling out shortcuts.
After watching the presentation, I am now curious about Humane’s thing though, but I’m still going to hold off for a bit because I want to see the failure modes first and I also don’t want to rush out and be one of the first to buy the brand new 3Com Audrey.
This is easy to fix IMHO. Pair a small screen in the future for typing or have a cuff link mic for whispering. You will see accessories like these pop up in the near future.
believe it or not, here in Ottawa Canada I was just reading a post on Reddit where people complain about those who were talking or doing video calls on the streets,
I think this will be a matter of culture and the barrier will be smaller as soon as the devices are "smarter" and not making you repeat yourself many times or, not understanding what you are asking.
I just find voice control too outward to use in public. I don't want people to know what I'm doing, even if it's something totally innocent, plus it would also be super annoying to be on a train full of people going "blah blah blah" to their devices.
If we could subvocalise with throat or other microphones/bone speaker then maaaybe, but I feel like it's better left to a brain interface and we should really just stick to touchscreen/typing interaction for now.
> Another revelation from that FCC filing: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is Humane’s largest shareholder.
> Altman owns “14.93% equity and voting through a number of holding companies none of which individually holds 10% or greater ownership interest in Humane,” the filing states.
Sam might be completely wrong about the most important things (I don't think so, but I don't think it's super unlikely either) and I still peg him as mostly genuine and smart, while not being very concerned with and certainly not being very good at being likeable.
He was fairly outspoken about getting (even more) rich off of other investments and believing OpenAI was simply too important to make it a conflict of interest, and mostly considers it a nuisance/distraction. That's fairly arrogant, and, again, might be completely off but I still do believe he means that and I would give it good odds to be the entirely right course of action, if most impact/most quickly is what you are going for.
I've been waiting for this. Seems like it is a self-contained cellular device requiring a subscription, which makes sense. I guess I am curious how I can be in communication with it. Will my contacts be texted from a new phone number? That seems like the biggest hurdle for me, as I'd just like to use my pre-existing cellular service that I already pay for.
I also find it curious that a former Apple exec formed this company. I'd assume Apple itself would want to pursue this internally, as such a device would be yet another killer addition to the iron grip of the Apple ecosystem.
Communication seems to be a major selling point of the pin going by the demo, but I'm pretty certain it is impossible for it to work with iMessage, WhatsApp etc. in the way that is shown, so I'm wary about the actual advantages.
100% this, the lack of a clear 3rd party integration path does raise alarm bells in terms of breaking into mainstream as a customer product. Curious to see where they are going with their “we don’t do apps” LLM ecosystem.
A bit tongue in cheek - I said "instantly destroy" because if the main selling point is an ai voice assistant, then people would just use what's already built into their phone/watch/airpods instead of paying 600$ if apple was to implement a better LLM for siri.
I'm skeptical of the usefulness of the hand projection vs a watch. And I think anyone who wants to bring a camera would be far better served by an iphone (or any phone).
Part of me just wants to get rid of my phone if I get a device that does the actually useful things. Get info about something, checks and sends messages in a smart way, checks the bus.
Most of the other stuff is just idling. I don't expect I would idle in the same way with an actually good assistant that respects me.
But then I'd prefer an open source Wikipedia/Wikimedia like organisation behind it.
> Part of me just wants to get rid of my phone if I get a device that does the actually useful things. Get info about something, checks and sends messages in a smart way, checks the bus.
This requires an always-on device, or always-in-the-cloud server processing your data and pushing updates to your device.
The former is limited by physics (battery), the latter is limited by how much data you want accessed from the cloud. Neither are solved by open source.
This looks like a cool toy that high-level members of an organization will buy, and nobody else.
It can’t compete in the consumer space, because it doesn’t let you waste time on social media. It can’t compete in the corporate world because it doesn’t have a screen — no email, no spreadsheets, no collaborative chat application we’ve all grown used to. And it can’t even be great for photography, since you need another device to view the photos and videos this thing takes.
If this thing takes off for its impressive AI capabilities, smartphone makers can pump R&D into their AI, and give us this for free as a software update. But right now, the only people who will use this are folks whose job involves scheduling meetings and firing off quick text messages to colleagues and clients.
This thing is great for old people who can't see the screen. It is like a life alert on steroids that can order pizza. It is also great for kids for obvious reasons.
I can see something like this filling a niche with the elderly population as like an external memory. (Or even just for forgetful adhd folks like myself, having something I can ask "wait, what did my wife just say to me 5 minutes ago?" ;) )
Black Mirror's "The Entire History of You" S1E03 episode has one take on what would happen if we could effortlessly record -- and replay -- everything. As with most Black Mirrors, there are some dark but believeable ideas.
Incidentally, it was written by Jess Armstrong who later created "Succession".
I recommend "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by the brilliant Ted Chiang, a short story featuring a related social situation. People in the story use a recorder with highly advanced search and indexing capabilities so it becomes possible to instantly access a video of anywhere you've been, or of any conversation you've had.
The elderly example is actually an extremely good/thought provoking idea. I can imagine my Grandparents getting huge use out of this, including with smart home functionality, if it got to where it needs to get to.
The guy had a Ted talk a while back going into his motivations. I believe the main one was he didn't like how phones get between you and the world, and take you out of the moment. This was an attempt to make tech that isn't a distraction in your life but that fades into the background. That was his driving principle, I believe.
People are thinking about the form factor after the cell phone. Apple is busy training everyone to use hand gestures with the new Apple Watch and upcoming Apple Vision. Humane is going down the path of projecting on the hand and touch.
"What comes next" is interesting as a problem formulation insofar as it encourages solution based thinking ("Here's the solution I think is next, for an problem still to be identified- other than it is what comes next.)
> People are thinking about the form factor after the cell phone.
That presumes there is one. There's not yet a "form factor after the car" for example. Just refinement of the same basic 4-wheeled template, with a few oddball vehicles for niche uses.
A possible indicator here is the apparent lack of demand for small screen phones. To me it suggests that screen real estate is more valuable than portability for most people.
> I don't understand the insistence on using voice as the main interaction and ditching the screen.
There was a google i/o talk a few years back were they talked about users wanting multi-modal, an example being they ask for restaurant recommendations by voice, then get the list they can view on their device. Both query and results are presented in their easiest modal, and humans will naturally switch between them.
This thing seem dead on arrival. Who wants to hold their hand up like that? Who wants to look at an uneven "screen"? Can you use it while walking or experience the movement in a vehicle? (car, bus, subway)
I agree with you on all points except one. Arguably the uneven "screen" problem can be solved with a depth camera and warping the projection to match the contours of your hand. Since they already support hand gestures on the target hand it's possible they already have the equipment built-in to do this.
Eyes should stay mostly fixed relative to a pin on your chest, as long as you're looking in the same direction (ie your hand). I think the differences would be small enough, especially since the display seems pretty blurry anyway
Projection warping should be viewer position independent (within a limited scope), only relying on the position of the projector and the screen. Some home theater projectors which already do this to an extent. And there are some famous public performances where video is projected onto a building and warped to match the contours in such a way as to give a convincing 3d effect (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ_5sDvAlNY). You can perform this kind of projection warping on a raspberry pi.
If you've used VR passthrough, you'll know that the latency will not work out well. You have to capture, analyze, calculate, and project in low, single digit milliseconds, against a moving target from a moving target
I repeat: it's a combadge. It solves the self-evident problem of there not being combadges available and in use.
Or, at least, it's almost a combadge. A good qualitative jump forward, but with plenty of unwanted features like subscription (I guess this could work for a Ferengi combadge), screen, wake words, etc. A combadge doesn't need to be an image projector, nor does it need rich tactile controls. But I guess you can improve the product-problem fit by ignoring those features.
The route is usually shown in great detail on your car's display. You also get a voice prompt just before you need to start thinking about turning. Is this a genuine problem?
I assume this pin will use GPS? It’s not always accurate. Sometimes the GPS is off. With a phone screen, you can better estimate where you’re standing by looking around you and then comparing what’s on the map.
For example, the GPS is almost never accurate in Hong Kong, when I visited.
Not just Apple. Any smart watch or ear buds with Google or Amazon AI. I think ear buds paired to a phone are already the perfect form factor for this kind of thing. My Pixel Buds are already pretty good at this and I absolutely never use it.
The device and the subscription both cost more than my Pixel 8 Pro + Google Fi. Seems a bit steep, especially considering that the P8P can do most or all of these AI tricks and then some, except for clinging to my shirt.
Haha what do you mean, that's the main feature they are advertising here. I agree that the advent of portable high-output, low-power audio amplifiers is chiefly responsible for the downfall of human society so I, too, hate to see it.
It even comes with a "Personic Speaker". From the website: "Ai Pin’s speaker system uses a Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) to create a personally optimized bubble of sound, at a fixed distance, regardless of how soft or loud."
When you hear made up phrases like "Personic Speaker" or "Dynamic Island", it's usually a technical problem so glaring they're trying to spin it as a benefit.
One thing I am quite interested in here is the gesture controls. Google completely fumbled their Project Soli (although I bet they filed a thousand patents for it) but it's the kind of interface I want when driving my car. Buttons are better than touchscreens but gestures could be better than both.
Almost the entire beginning of the video is about which colors are available and how the battery snaps, with zero hints about why I would need a cringe projector on me.
I can't believe this was shipped by ex-Apple people. Imagine Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone like this: "We are introducing a revolutionary new device. The first thing you should know about it is that it has a charger and an Apple processor. The second most important thing: here is how the battery works."
I couldn't figure out why he kept touching and adjusting the pin on her chest, a thing I would never do with a coworker. All I knew was that she was CEO and he was Chairman, so I knew it was a joint decision. This makes so much more sense.
The TED reveal he did was really bad but I attributed it to being live. Think it's telling that they internally didn't see that and tell him "Dude, you desperately need to take speaking classes" and that with a pre-recording that was the best take.
Sign no one internally is being honest with them, feels they can say "It's bad"...
This strikes me as a less-functional Apple Watch that you wear on your shirt instead of your wrist.
(Yes, Siri is not great today, but that will change very quickly with Apple working hard on their own LLMs.)
Cool project, but not something I imagine most people will want. Like Google Glass.
They even did the cringey stunt Google Glass tried and featured it on the runway during Fashion Week, as if that instantly makes something fashionable:
Indeed. It just screams "comm badge", which makes the product idea obvious, and makes me surprised they somehow managed to make zero references to Star Trek in the entire godawfully long landing page.
Watches & phones don't have the optical & audio "visibility" of the Humane AI Pin -- which, incidentally, looks an awful lot like the Axon body-worn cameras for police.
If you really want to Always Be Surveilling, wouldn't a better solution be a tiny cam/mic accessory that pairs with your phone/watch? You could use the same magnetic battery idea, but in a much smaller form factor.
This thing (the Humane AI Pin) is aiming to be a phone replacement, which seems like a really steep challenge given its limitations--how could it replace any of the things I use my phone for on the subway to work?
Yeah, just realized this is an Apple Watch competitor — but one that requires and odd new paradigm of interactivity that seems much worse than that of the Watch. Lifting your wrist up and having a small screen you can look at and talk to seems so intuitive in a way that the Humane widget doesn't.
Think of the simple interaction of wanting to issue a voice command in public. Watch: Bring it close to your mouth, maybe cover both with the other hand to be even less audible to others. Humane: Smoosh your shirt up to your face?
(Also: I live in one of the sunniest places on earth — I simply don't trust that I'll be able to see light projections onto my hand when I'm outside.)
Anyway. All in favor of exploration and new ideas. Very willing to be proven wrong on the form factor. But I also feel like we've kind of solved the wearable computing interface problem — a couple hundred years ago, turns out — and so it's going to take a lot of convincing.
Also more expensive, i pay 10/month for a dedicated watch, and i can still make 3rd part apps for it, i can't do that with humane as far as i can tell and don't really want to put it on my shirt like this.
Only real differentiator is maybe the real time translation, but that's not a frequent use case and i think i can take my phone out for that with google translate as needed.
It's too bad, love new hardware, this isn't it for me at least with that price and functionality.
I don't think this really competes with a phone. If anything it competes with a smartwatch. And as far as wearable tech, a watch blends in much better.
And a smartwatch offers a lot of health features, too! Something many people seem to find interesting and useful.
The watch is an accessory to the phone that adds features plus offers convenience and if you want to, it can temporarily substitute your phone like when you go to the gym. A cellular Apple Watch combined with Air Pods can do a lot. And both the Apple Watch and the Air Pods have use cases in addition to that in other situations. I don't see that here at all. I see a device with a very limited feature set.
Almost. I was almost sold until they mentioned the monthly subscription. This device looks so futuristic, but monthly subscriptions are (should be) a thing of the past.
Seems like cool tech and I'm excited to see how it does. I guess I'm sort of expecting a flop since this relies on good connection and fast ai over cell signal still seems like a challenge in a lot of places (upload voice file, speech recognition, nlu/llm orchestration, etc) but I do love the idea of a less intrusive 'smart phone' that would let me leave my phone at home more.
On another note, this reminds me a lot of the short story The Perfect Match by Ken Liu. The story isn't ground breaking but is worth a read and harps on AI assistants making decisions for people and driving biases based on the corporate agenda and sponsors (not to get too tinfoil hatty).
> A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to Humane. Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno had developed concepts for two A.I. products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through their acupuncturist, recommended that they shared the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.
> Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”
> “It’s going to be a massive company,” he added.
This product was also named a "best invention of 2023" by TIME magazine before it was even released. Entirely by coincidence, Marc Benioff happens to own TIME magazine.
HBO's Silicon Valley may be over, but the real world Silicon Valley is still going stronger than ever.
maybe its tracking your hand and aiming the projection ?. Can't really say much based on the landing page, I doubt most of the interactions are as smooth as they are pictured. But it is refreshing to see a new take on mobile devices.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadAlexa was the closest to achieve significant usage since you can use it within the privacy of your home.
For voice UIs the non clear boundaries on what you think it can or cannot do is also a huge hurdle. After you get a couple “sorry I cannot do that” you stop using it
Combine that with areas like GPT Vision, (GPT?) Whisper, etc .. it'll start feeling a lot more natural here very soon i suspect.
TBH i'm surprised Apple isn't pushing this much harder. They tout Siri so hard but it's just worthless to me. It feels like apple could make a AI Pin like this, but visibly from the public side i have zero idea that the're even working in this space. It feels like they purposefully watched the boat sail away.
edit: Sidenote, Pin + Airpods would be a nice way to interface more quietly too.
These next gen AI voice assistants are still a solid improvement over Google's current offerings, but they'll feel like a massive jump into the future for folks that have been stuck in Apple's ecosystem, and that's probably where the biggest opportunity lies.
I went through this exercise with GPT voice. It's an awesome capability, but other than perhaps walking outside, or sitting in my office, there's no other space where it feels "ok" to just spontaneously talk to something.
A grey area is when you perhaps have headphones in / on and it looks like you're in a phone conversation with somebody, then it kinda feels ok, but generally you're not going to take a phone conversation in a public area without distancing yourself from others.
There's a reason most casual communication these days is text rather than voice or video calls.
"Siri, lights to HALF."
"Siri, lights to HAAAAALF."
"Siri, LIGHTS TO FIFTY PERCENT!"
Silly how OpenAI could blow all voice assistants out of the water today, if they just added Android intents as function calls to the ChatGPT app. Yes, the "voice chat mode" is that good.
With alexa i can program if/then statements, like basically when i say X then do Y. If something like chatgpt requires the same thing then i don't see the advantage.
So LLMs today can do this a few ways. One they can write and execute code. You can ask for some complex math (eg calculate the tip for this bill), and the LLM can respond with a python program to execute that math, then the wrapping program can execute this and return the result. You can scale this up a bit, use your creativity at the possiblities (eg SQL queries, one-off UIs, etc).
You can also use an LLM to “craft a call to an API from <api library>”. Today, Alexa basically works by calling an API. You get a weather api, a timer api, etc and make them all conform to the Alexa standard. An LLM can one-up it by using any existing API unchanged, as long as there’s adequate documentation somewhere for the LLM.
An LLM won’t revolutionize Alexa type use cases, but it will give it a way to reach the “long tail” of APIs and data retrieval. LLMs are pretty novel for the “write custom code to solve this unique problem” use case.
> and to a lesser degree malformed output
What's cool, is that this isn't a huge issue. Most LLMs how have "grammar" controls, where the model doesn't select any character as the next one, it selects the highest-probability character that conforms to the grammar. This dramatically helps things like well-formed JSON (or XML or... ) output.
Yes, I was thinking about even something as if/then, which could be configured in the UI and manifest to GPT-4 as the usual function call stuff.
The advantage here would be twofold:
1. GPT-4 won't need you to talk a weird command language; it's quite good at understanding regular talk and turning it into structured data. It will have no problem understanding things like "oh flip the lights in the living room and run some music, idk, maybe some Beatles", followed by "nah, too bright, tone it down a little", and reliably converting them into data you could feed to your if/else logic.
2. ChatGPT (the app) has a voice recognition model that, unlike Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa, does not suck. It's the first model I've experienced that can convert my casual speech into text with 95%+ accuracy even with lots of ambient noise.
Those are the features ChatGPT app offers today. Right now, if they added a basic bidirectional Tasker integration (user-configurable "function calls" emitting structured data for Tasker, and ability for Tasker to add messages into chat), anyone could quickly DIY something 20x better than Google Assistant.
Of course this isn't fool proof, and there still needs to be work defining capabilities of systems, etc. (although these are tasks AI can assist with). But it's promising - "teaching" the system how to do new things is relatively simple, and effectively akin to describing capabilities rather than programming directly.
The basic idea is to instruct the llm to output some kind of signal in text (often a json blob) that describes what it should do, then have a normal program use that json to execute some function.
Even though everyone's seen AirPods by now, in those rare occasions when I'm on the phone in public, I feel compelled to have my phone out and vaguely talking at it, so it's clear I'm on a phone call and not a crazy person.
I'm curious if we would see similar usage with the pin, where voice commands in public are always performed with the hand up for the projection screen (it will still prompt looks, but hopefully be clear in context, "oh they're doing some tech thing").
Of course at this price point, it's highly dubious that we'll see anywhere near the ubiquitous market penetration of AirPods (which garner understandable complaints about the price point sub-$200, and that's with a clear value prop).
The other reason they are mostly impractical - keeping a charge. *wired* headsets were great in this regard, but then there's the wire, and now, there's the phone (that may not even support the wire?).
Still I would guess Meta Glasses or AirPods should be better to handle such whispered mode since microphones are so much closer. Would be interesting if Airpods had some contact mic that could pickup whispered sound inside your mouth.
Maybe the holly grail is to have something inside your mouth so you don't have to even make voice - device will figure out what you want to speak from how mouth and tongue movement - smart tooth braces anyone? :)
The issues isn’t “communicating with the device” it’s “communicating around other people”.
I have almost negative interest in having to recite the technical specifics of my web search to my phone on the train to work. I have even less interest in having to listen to the person next to me trying to do the same.
I don't see how what you are saying holds any water in that scenario.
It does not seem right to speak of a single reason. There are probably multiple. So, IMHO it would be more productive to come up with a list and put some weights on the options if you want to dissect this matter.
IMHO one very strong factor / important reason (one that you ignore) is the social context. Ie the reaction of others in the same physical space, as you start talking out loud, seemingly unmotivated.
Humans are social animals, and so the reaction of others to the actions you do tend to be very important to a large fraction of the population. What is acceptable in one context simply isn't in another. Also, the exact tolerances tend to differ with the local culture (here "local" is used in the sense "geographically/physically local")
It's not just about not annoying others here. In this case it's also about a thing as imprecise as "perceived self image". Some people (I'd argue, most people) dislike having the perception that others perceive them to be mentally unstable or rude. Most people need some kind of social acceptance for the actions they do.
One significant trait of some mental instabilities (as well as some drug induced behavioral changes) is that those affected will spontanously start talking in public. You will probably know the Tourettes Syndrome, and the alchoholic rambling about because these cases often imply quite rude and offensive verbiage and/or loud volume, but these are not the only cases.
People in general are well adept at detecting such anomalous behaviour as it is part of our insticts trained through Evolution. Also the uncomfortable feelings that observing this type of behaviour leads to will lead many to react with a "confront or escape" (aka. "fight or flee") response (a stress signal), which is not beneficial to social interaction in general.
TL;DR: If you speak out in public without a very clear and socially valid reason (speaking to an object is not that) you are not only rude to others, but you also cause them stress... and you will have to face the social stigma of being perceived as insane.
(edit: grammar/typos)
Except... this problem is known to be trivially solvable. After all, the very act of putting a flat rectangle to your ear makes talking out loud in public not just perfectly acceptable, but mundane and not worth paying attention to (subject to social norms dictating where it is or isn't OK to be on the phone).
As for talking to yourself signalling insanity... I'd hope that stupid and probably developmentally retarding idea died long ago, and the "talking to yourself out loud in public" subtrope being dead since wireless earphones got ubiquitous some two decades ago.
The modern reality is, hearing someone "talking to themselves" is normal, and 99.9% of times means they're on a call.
The point is it's not, though. As a society we have generally established that it is rude to be speaking out loud on the phone in public. Especially on the bus or the train or waiting for same or in the shop or at a movie or any number of other places. I genuinely think it would be easier instead to list the places where it would be okay (in a busy street, if you step to one side). Even in these places there is some expectation that you show a little shame to be doing it, as though you didnt want to but had to because the call is important
After watching the presentation, I am now curious about Humane’s thing though, but I’m still going to hold off for a bit because I want to see the failure modes first and I also don’t want to rush out and be one of the first to buy the brand new 3Com Audrey.
Talking to my cuff isn't going to make this better
If we could subvocalise with throat or other microphones/bone speaker then maaaybe, but I feel like it's better left to a brain interface and we should really just stick to touchscreen/typing interaction for now.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953901/humane-ai-pin-la...
I guess they really do hate smartphones…
> Altman owns “14.93% equity and voting through a number of holding companies none of which individually holds 10% or greater ownership interest in Humane,” the filing states.
https://www.lowpass.cc/p/humane-ai-pin-cellular-mvno-sam-alt...
He was fairly outspoken about getting (even more) rich off of other investments and believing OpenAI was simply too important to make it a conflict of interest, and mostly considers it a nuisance/distraction. That's fairly arrogant, and, again, might be completely off but I still do believe he means that and I would give it good odds to be the entirely right course of action, if most impact/most quickly is what you are going for.
I also find it curious that a former Apple exec formed this company. I'd assume Apple itself would want to pursue this internally, as such a device would be yet another killer addition to the iron grip of the Apple ecosystem.
It's nice to see this product isn't actually vapor. Congrats to them.
Why wouldn't I use my existing watch/phone/earbuds/pods instead of paying 600$+subscription for this?
I don't understand the insistence on using voice as the main interaction and ditching the screen.
At least google glass/AR let's me read
I'm skeptical of the usefulness of the hand projection vs a watch. And I think anyone who wants to bring a camera would be far better served by an iphone (or any phone).
Most of the other stuff is just idling. I don't expect I would idle in the same way with an actually good assistant that respects me.
But then I'd prefer an open source Wikipedia/Wikimedia like organisation behind it.
Siri itself is lacking but I expect that to change with an LLM soon.
You can already lock down your phone to prevent distracting apps.
I've skeptical that people would actually choose to go without a phone in favor of this
This requires an always-on device, or always-in-the-cloud server processing your data and pushing updates to your device.
The former is limited by physics (battery), the latter is limited by how much data you want accessed from the cloud. Neither are solved by open source.
It can’t compete in the consumer space, because it doesn’t let you waste time on social media. It can’t compete in the corporate world because it doesn’t have a screen — no email, no spreadsheets, no collaborative chat application we’ve all grown used to. And it can’t even be great for photography, since you need another device to view the photos and videos this thing takes.
If this thing takes off for its impressive AI capabilities, smartphone makers can pump R&D into their AI, and give us this for free as a software update. But right now, the only people who will use this are folks whose job involves scheduling meetings and firing off quick text messages to colleagues and clients.
Incidentally, it was written by Jess Armstrong who later created "Succession".
https://web.archive.org/web/20140208000114/https://kaptureau...
EDIT: had to share promo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arQoSSXKaSQ
People are thinking about the form factor after the cell phone. Apple is busy training everyone to use hand gestures with the new Apple Watch and upcoming Apple Vision. Humane is going down the path of projecting on the hand and touch.
Apple's implementations are for 1 hand operation. You can operate the watch's touch screen while holding a steering wheel for example.
What's the difference between the objectively not great screen that is my hand, and the oled watch that doesn't require both my hands for operation?
EDIT Heck this requires one hand just to see anything. I can look at my watch without any hands!
That presumes there is one. There's not yet a "form factor after the car" for example. Just refinement of the same basic 4-wheeled template, with a few oddball vehicles for niche uses.
A possible indicator here is the apparent lack of demand for small screen phones. To me it suggests that screen real estate is more valuable than portability for most people.
There was a google i/o talk a few years back were they talked about users wanting multi-modal, an example being they ask for restaurant recommendations by voice, then get the list they can view on their device. Both query and results are presented in their easiest modal, and humans will naturally switch between them.
This thing seem dead on arrival. Who wants to hold their hand up like that? Who wants to look at an uneven "screen"? Can you use it while walking or experience the movement in a vehicle? (car, bus, subway)
Is this just a big sunk cost fallacy launch?
It's a combadge.
I repeat: it's a combadge. It solves the self-evident problem of there not being combadges available and in use.
Or, at least, it's almost a combadge. A good qualitative jump forward, but with plenty of unwanted features like subscription (I guess this could work for a Ferengi combadge), screen, wake words, etc. A combadge doesn't need to be an image projector, nor does it need rich tactile controls. But I guess you can improve the product-problem fit by ignoring those features.
Simple example: which way do I go at the next intersection?
Or if I'm driving, GPS is displayed on a giant screen.
Not saying this is for everyone, but there will be users.
For example, the GPS is almost never accurate in Hong Kong, when I visited.
https://youtu.be/aBdVfUnS-pM
Almost the entire beginning of the video is about which colors are available and how the battery snaps, with zero hints about why I would need a cringe projector on me.
I can't believe this was shipped by ex-Apple people. Imagine Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone like this: "We are introducing a revolutionary new device. The first thing you should know about it is that it has a charger and an Apple processor. The second most important thing: here is how the battery works."
I couldn't figure out why he kept touching and adjusting the pin on her chest, a thing I would never do with a coworker. All I knew was that she was CEO and he was Chairman, so I knew it was a joint decision. This makes so much more sense.
Sign no one internally is being honest with them, feels they can say "It's bad"...
(Yes, Siri is not great today, but that will change very quickly with Apple working hard on their own LLMs.)
Cool project, but not something I imagine most people will want. Like Google Glass.
They even did the cringey stunt Google Glass tried and featured it on the runway during Fashion Week, as if that instantly makes something fashionable:
https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_1200,c_limit,q...
Though from the reviews I've seen (and as with so many Bluetooth devices), it's unusably terrible, and the battery only lasts a few hours.
A touch more seriously, the Narrative Clip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Clip
https://thenextweb.com/news/narratives-clip-2-wearable-camer...
This thing (the Humane AI Pin) is aiming to be a phone replacement, which seems like a really steep challenge given its limitations--how could it replace any of the things I use my phone for on the subway to work?
It’s a great point that if this modality becomes popular, then it should just be an accessory on top of iPhone or iWatch.
Think of the simple interaction of wanting to issue a voice command in public. Watch: Bring it close to your mouth, maybe cover both with the other hand to be even less audible to others. Humane: Smoosh your shirt up to your face?
(Also: I live in one of the sunniest places on earth — I simply don't trust that I'll be able to see light projections onto my hand when I'm outside.)
Anyway. All in favor of exploration and new ideas. Very willing to be proven wrong on the form factor. But I also feel like we've kind of solved the wearable computing interface problem — a couple hundred years ago, turns out — and so it's going to take a lot of convincing.
Only real differentiator is maybe the real time translation, but that's not a frequent use case and i think i can take my phone out for that with google translate as needed.
It's too bad, love new hardware, this isn't it for me at least with that price and functionality.
The watch is an accessory to the phone that adds features plus offers convenience and if you want to, it can temporarily substitute your phone like when you go to the gym. A cellular Apple Watch combined with Air Pods can do a lot. And both the Apple Watch and the Air Pods have use cases in addition to that in other situations. I don't see that here at all. I see a device with a very limited feature set.
Edit: Wording
On another note, this reminds me a lot of the short story The Perfect Match by Ken Liu. The story isn't ground breaking but is worth a read and harps on AI assistants making decisions for people and driving biases based on the corporate agenda and sponsors (not to get too tinfoil hatty).
> A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to Humane. Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno had developed concepts for two A.I. products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through their acupuncturist, recommended that they shared the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.
> Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”
> “It’s going to be a massive company,” he added.
This product was also named a "best invention of 2023" by TIME magazine before it was even released. Entirely by coincidence, Marc Benioff happens to own TIME magazine.
HBO's Silicon Valley may be over, but the real world Silicon Valley is still going stronger than ever.