Humane has been teasing its first device, the AI Pin, for most of this year. It’s scheduled to launch the Pin on Thursday, but The Verge has obtained documents detailing practically everything about the device ahead of its official launch. What they show is that Humane, the company noisily promoting a world after smartphones, is about to launch what amounts to a $699 wearable smartphone without a screen that has a $24-a-month subscription fee and runs on a Humane-branded version of T-Mobile’s network with access to AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI.
The Pin itself is a square device that magnetically clips to your clothes or other surfaces. The clip is more than just a magnet, though; it’s also a battery pack, which means you can swap in new batteries throughout the day to keep the Pin running. We don’t know how long a single battery lasts, but the device ships with two “battery boosters.” It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and uses a camera, depth, and motion sensors to track and record its surroundings. It has a built-in speaker, which Humane calls a “personic speaker,” and can connect to Bluetooth headphones.
Since there’s no screen, Humane has come up with new ways to interact with the Pin. It’s primarily meant to be a voice-based device, but there’s also that green laser projector we’ve seen in demos, which can project information onto your hand. You can also hold objects up to the camera and interact with the Pin through gestures, as there’s a touchpad somewhere on the device. The Pin isn’t always recording or even listening for a wake word, instead requiring you to manually activate it in some way. It has a “Trust Light,” which blinks on whenever the Pin is recording.
The documents show that Humane wants the Pin to be considered a fully standalone device, rather than an accessory to your smartphone. $699 gets you the Pin, a charger, and those two battery boosters. But the real story is that it costs $24 per month for a Humane Subscription, which includes a phone number and cell data on Humane’s own branded wireless service that runs on T-Mobile’s network, cloud storage for photos and videos, and the ability to make unlimited queries of AI models, although we’re not sure which ones specifically.
Humane didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Pin’s operating system is called Cosmos, and rather than operate as a collection of apps, Humane seems to be imagining a more seamless system that can call up various AIs and other tools as you need them. It sounds a bit like ChatGPT’s plugins system, through which you can attach new features or data to your chatbot experience — which tracks with reports that the Pin would be powered by GPT-4.
The documents we’ve seen say the Pin can write messages that sound like you, and there’s a feature that will summarize your email inbox for you. The Pin can also translate languages and identify food to provide nutritional information. There is support for Tidal music streaming, which involves an “AI DJ” that picks music for you based on your current context. It will also offer AI-centric photography features, but it’s not clear what that means.
Humane clearly intends the Pin to be a self-contained and simple wearable, but there is a way to manage the device: a tool called Humane.center, which is where you’re meant to set up and customize your device before you start wearing it. It’s unclear whether this is a website or a phone app, but it’s how you access the notes, videos, and photos you collect while you’re wearing the Pin.
Humane is set to announce the device officially tomorrow, at which point we might get more answers about when the Pin will ship, how well it will work, and whether there’s really a case to be made for a smartphone without a screen.
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